Pandemic Governance: A Comparative Study on COVID-19 Crisis Responses between the United States and South Korea

It was only a few years ago that the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the world, but the world is still reeling from its aftereffects. Some countries managed to keep the virus under control relatively well, while the others did not. This paper will discuss the actions taken by the United States of America and South Korea and compare the approaches based on Coomb’s crisis responses model based on secondary databases. These two countries both provide a contrast in how countries (repetition) are handling this situation. Although these countries received their first cases of COVID-19 on the same day, South Korea has been more successful in containing and mitigating the effects of the outbreak. The success in South Korea was by practising transparency, providing maximum services to sufferers, providing adequate health equipment, and, most importantly, getting the public to comply with having mass tests to stop the spread of the virus quickly. Both countries with different degrees of success have executed similar approaches. The key takeaway from this paper is that for a containment plan or policy to be successful, it needs to be fully understood by the public. Transparency is the best strategy governments can implement to achieve their policy goals.