I think it's a little wreckless for the media to elevate the South Korea model without comparing ground realities. SK: basically an island, water on three sides, even more impenetrable North Korean DMZ on the other. Majority of their 50k visitors a day comes via air. Compared to Canada, while we're fortunate enough to only share border with US, but it's also a country 10x CAN population with very lax border crossing process. CAN/US exchange 300k people per day at many border crossings, some of them unmanned/unmonitored. If shit breaks down, it's basically a porous open border. Canada also has 130k air travelers per day. Both CAN & US also receives more visitors from more countries than Korea. Korean trade is done via shipping, Canada has vast supply chain dependency that networks directly into US via highways (thousands of truck drivers) and rail. The exposure, in terms of population flow and commerce, is on a totally different level. Other considerations, Korea has am ore compliant population, there's mandatory civil service and they were a dictatorship until 1979, so anyone over 50, i.e. the vulnerable population have experience with hard times knows how to fall in line (except the religious cults). They also have experience with SARS, which Toronto, Canada has as well, though our response was less than great according to our postmortem.

I feel like the media is hyping up S.Korea because it's the most reasonable democratic analogue with an adequate response. No one is going to take mimicking Taiwan, Singapore or HK model seriously because the gulf in ground realities is too large. But most medium size countries with porous border has closer conditions to China than South Korea.

Also I don't see this get mentioned at all, but S.Korea politics is pretty corrupt, at least measured against other OECD countries. Almost every one of their former presidents have been jailed or dirty for various reasons. I don't know why people trust their data given how politicized response to this virus is. The administration has every incentive to cover up as well. Time will tell.

See "The fates of former presidents of South Korea", it's a gongshow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_South_Ko...