Name: Fareed Zakaria: 'Lockdowns are a sign that you have failed'
Uploaded: 2020-10-27
Duration: 2 min 40 s
Description: He says Taiwan gets the 'gold star' for its coronavirus response.

 CLIFTON LEAF: One of the other lessons about thinking small is really in government, too, where, as you say, it's not about the dollars. It's about the quality of government. And the words that keep coming up are competence and simplicity and transparency and the free flow of information and also speed. And really, the fixes in some ways are kind of small. It's not like this big, giant new age plan that we need to come up with to prepare for the future. FAREED ZAKARIA: Absolutely, [? Chris. ?] And again, this applies to companies just as much as to countries. If you look at Taiwan, I really feel like we should spend a lot of time studying what Taiwan did. They get the gold star for the response to COVID. 24 million people right next to China-- they get millions of tourists from China. And yet, the number of COVID deaths in Taiwan is 7. And by the way, they are an open democracy, very transparent. And to add to this, they spend 1/3 as much on health care as the United States. So what did they do? It's exactly as you say. They acted early, aggressively, and intelligently. And the most intelligent part, they did not do a lockdown. Lockdowns are a sign that you have failed. You are using a big, blunt instrument, and you're crushing the economy. I'm not a fan of lockdowns at all. What the Taiwanese did instead was they did very smart testing, tracing, and then the most important part, isolating the potentially infected. So in a sense, they took a surgical scalpel at the problem rather than some kind of big mallet. And it wasn't just Taiwan. South Korea-- same thing. Singapore-- same thing. Vietnam-- to a large extent, the same thing. The most successful countries did not do lockdowns. Lockdowns are a sign you have failed. Intelligent testing, tracing, and isolation is the way to do it. And if you can manage that process-- and it just requires smarts, by the way. Taiwan is Democratic. South Korea is Democratic. Nobody used some kind of police powers that the Western governments don't have. If you are smart about it, you can do it. Companies need to be thinking about this. How can you get the most bang for your buck by being open, by being transparent, and by being intelligent? People say, well, they deprive people of liberties who they isolated. Well, aren't we-- we're depriving people of liberties when we shut down the entire economy. That's also a deprivation of civil liberties. You just got to be smart about it. 

Fareed Zakaria: 'Lockdowns are a sign that you have failed'

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Taiwan gets the 'gold star' for its coronavirus response.

He says Taiwan gets the 'gold star' for its coronavirus response.