© 2020 IAI ISSN 2532-6570 IAI COMMENTARIES 20 | 80 - NOVEMBER 2020 1 Malaysia’s Success Story in Curbing the COVID-19 Pandemic by Andrea Passeri Andrea Passeri is Adjunct Professor of International Relations of East Asia at the University of Bologna and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS), National University of Malaysia (UKM). As the world witnesses a watershed era marked by a progressive power shift from West to East, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has further signalled that the age of Western hegemony is coming to an end, to be replaced by the advent of the “Asian century”. In such perspective, even a sneak peek at the data provided by the World Health Organisation highlights an irrefutable truth: East Asian countries have largely outperformed their European and North American counterparts when it comes to handling the pandemic. This is true both in terms of the formulation of more efective policy responses to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, and in the attainment of a far higher degree of social compliance with the restrictive measures and standard operating procedures (SOPs) imposed to mitigate this unprecedented health crisis. As of mid-September, with the notable exception of the Philippines that sits at the 21st place worldwide for total confrmed cases, no other East Asian nation features in the list of the 25 most afected countries, whereas the European and American continents hold eight spots in the top ten. 1 Southeast Asia, in particular, has recorded 562,807 infections thus far (1.9 per cent of the global toll), which stand in stark contrast with the overall number of cases sufered in the Americas (14,815,178) and Europe (4,840,830). Such a startling discrepancy acquires an even greater magnitude by looking at COVID-19’s mortality rate, oscillating above 10 per cent in Italy, Belgium and the UK, compared with countries like Vietnam (3.29 per cent), Thailand (1.68 per cent) and Malaysia (1.29 per cent) 1 For the updated fgures provided by the World Health Organisation on the global spread of COVID-19, see: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard, https://covid19.who.int.