The seven habits of COVID-resilient nations

3. Follow the data in real time.

Resilience depends on governments responding early and decisively to fluid realities. That, in turn, requires a commitment to “‘Follow the data’ as a beacon for policy and decision making,” Grossman, of Deakin University, told me.

South Korea has advanced data infrastructure—including a cutting-edge (if also problematic, from a privacy perspective) contact-tracing system—that enabled authorities to swiftly collect and analyze various sorts of pandemic-related data as a means of detecting early warning signs and assessing the effects of government policies. Employing its sensitive, multilevel alert system for infectious-disease risks, the government shifted its focus to economic recovery when new COVID cases dropped and shifted back to virus mitigation when cases surged again.

South Korea was one of only several countries in the Bertelsmann Stiftung study that “succeeded in regularly reviewing the effectiveness of their policies, and in adapting them on an ongoing basis to rapidly changing circumstances or new knowledge,” the report notes.

That achievement should not be underestimated. “Real-time learning [during a crisis] is very, very difficult in the majority of countries,” including nearly all of the study’s front-runners, Christof Schiller, a governance expert at Bertelsmann Stiftung and a co-author of its report, told me. “Korea could be an exception there.”