This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 29th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Why of countries like South Korea, Japan, performed so well at battling the coronavirus,

while Western countries, most especially the United States, have failed to contain it

or even really slow its spread.

Cato's Terence Keeley believes it comes down to the role of science

in society.

We spoke last week.

There is a vibrant debate among people about which countries appear to have performed well, which countries appear to have

performed poorly in this COVID-19 pandemic that we've had across the globe. If you are a Twitter person and I

regrettably am a Twitter person there's a chart that made the rounds numerous

times and it is simply if you look at the doubling rate of the illness

The countries that stand out Japan and South Korea and people will draw a big circle around Japan and South Korea and say

masks and then they show the chart doubling at a much faster rate in countries like the United States and elsewhere.

They circle that and say no masks.

And that's obviously oversimplifying things, but to what extent can we attribute culture

to the differences in how countries have dealt with this illness.

I think masks are about the least important thing and I think culture is pretty unimportant and I think the most successful country is Taiwan by the way

Taiwan has recorded days this month without a single case, but yes course, the great successes are in East Asia, and the great failures, I'm afraid, are in the West, and the United States of America and the United Kingdom are amongst the worst performing countries. So the question is why?

And it's much more sophisticated than masks and yet

much much simpler.

So you've simply got to do a timeline. On January the 27th

...