Success story of controlling COVID-19 in East Asia: lessons for South Asia

Abstract

The novel coronavirus is an issue of life and death. The main purpose of the study is to know the East Asian success story of controlling Covid-19 and identify which strategies could be a lesson for South Asia and to examine the influence of good governance on controlling COVID-19. Total daily cases of COVID-19 are collected from March 10 to June 15 for East Asian and March 4 to June 15 for South Asian countries. ARIMA forecasting, ADF test, stability test, and diagnostic tests are applied. The minimum value of AIC and BIC shows the appropriate model is ARIMA (0, 1, 1) for both regions. In the East and South Asian model, the coefficients of the constant term are -0.759451 and 198.0155, and coefficients of MA (1) are -0.715686 and -0.339701 respectively for both regions. It's significant at a 1% significance level and support our hypotheses that the total daily cases of COVID-19 decreasing into East Asia but increasing into South Asia and prove that the South Asia region has faced a lot of difficulties to tackle COVID-19 as most of the countries have not enough government capacity, weak institutions, limited resources, narrow government reaches to the vulnerable people and corruption compare to East Asian region and no actual strategies are yet noticeable from the governments of South Asia as a result transmission increases day by day. That is why; we think that South Asian countries could take lessons from East Asian countries as these countries are more successful to control COVID-19.