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A group of FEMA students have joined forces with other ���պ��� ex-students to pen a number of articles with the aim of informing the online community about the decisions taken by ASEAN countries in the wake of COVID-19.

 

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is the organisation linking 10 countries in South East Asia with a combined population of almost two thirds of a billion. Although the styles of government vary, they all have the common threat of facing the COVID-19 pandemic before others worldwide due to their proximity to China

 

���պ��� lecturer, , kicked off this initiative when he asked his students to help him collect data on the decisions taken by ASEAN countries.

 

Although initially, the plan was to model the Maltese development of COVID-19 cases by using ASEAN countries as a projection in line with past articles, the variation in results was found to be very high.

 

So instead, the students set off to analyse a number of articles separately, namely Brunei & Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR & Myanmar, Malaysia, The Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

 

This research yielded a number of interesting findings, such as:

• the fact that death rates per million of populations in some of these countries remained relatively low;

• it is not the case that the poorer countries are worse off due to the pandemic;

• more developed countries would be less likely to close off borders and shock their economy;

• richer countries are bound to have cities with higher densities, people living longer and hence more elderly that are at risk, but more money to conduct swab tests;

• results can fluctuate from excellent to terrible as was noted in Singapore. 

“This experience has taught me, and I’m hoping, my students, that there definitely isn’t a rule book on how to tackle the pandemic. What we can do is take certain individual measures, such as the closure of schools, and investigate those against a particular context. This will at least be of guidance for other similar situations and can help us improve on current measures”, Dr Cortis said about the initiative.

The articles can be found online, as per below: