Hwaseong, South Korea
- As Omicron pushes Western countries towards reopening, Asia is hunkering down, sharpening an East-West divide on the balance between public health, the economy and basic rights and freedoms.
While the highly transmissible coronavirus variant is accelerating the move toward living with COVID-19 in Europe and North America, life in much of the Asia Pacific is little less restricted - and in some cases even more restricted - than at the start of the pandemic.
The widening divide comes even as many Asia Pacific countries boast vaccination rates higher than those of their Western counterparts.
The region's ultra-cautious stance two years into the pandemic raises questions about its endgame as border controls and strict social distancing rules, although credited with achieving some of the world's lowest death tolls, inflict growing social and economic costs.
"There is a certain level of COVID-related mortality that the society is willing to accept," Cho Sung-il, a professor of epidemiology at Seoul National University in South Korea, told Al Jazeera.
"Individually, there is a certain level of COVID-related risk one is willing to accept, to balance against what one has to pay for it, in terms of social distancing plus vaccination. Asians may be valuing life over freedom, if culture matters at all. Maybe because we don't have the strong memory of civil revolutions risking life for freedom." Read Full Artice
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