









































Communication, Society and Media 
ISSN 2576-5388 (Print) ISSN 2576-5396 (Online) 

Vol. 3, No. 3, 2020 
www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm 

94 
 

Critical Factors in Containing COVID-19: Lessons from 

Selected Countries 
Amb. Dr. John O. Kakonge1* 

1 President, Association of Former International Civil Servants in Kenya (AFICS-Kenya) 
* Amb. Dr. John O. Kakonge, President, Association of Former International Civil Servants in Kenya 

(AFICS-Kenya) 

 

Received: August 1, 2020        Accepted: August 7, 2020       Online Published: August 13, 2020 

doi:10.22158/csm.v3n3p94                       URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/csm.v3n3p94 

 

1. Introduction 

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has affected over 190 countries. In responding to the pandemic, 

countries around the world have developed their own containment strategies, with varying degrees of 

success: some have achieved nearly total success in containing the disease, while others have seen a 

constant rise in infections and deaths. The successful countries have evidenced common responses and 

strategies, linked in large part to a firm commitment by their leaders to confront the pandemic matched 

by a strong sense of social cohesion by the countries’ citizens. This paper explores five factors that have 

been critical to the progress achieved in containing the coronavirus in a few selected countries and their 

lessons for Kenya and other African countries. 

 

2. Critical factors for Containing COVID-19 

2.1 Public Buy-in 

First, before many countries went into lockdown, governments had to inform their citizens about what 

they were planning to do to contain the coronavirus. There were sporadic protests, but in some 

countries, people were not given a choice: this was the case in China, India, Nigeria, South Africa and 

elsewhere. For example, in India, many migrant workers found themselves stranded in major cities 

such as Delhi and Mumbai and unable to return to their home states and villages once public transport 

was suspended.  

According to Flournoy and Morell (2020), communist regimes like China boasted that they had 

performed better than the rest of the world because they had used a draconian approach to ensure that 

their citizens had no choice other than to respect the lockdown and other measures put in place to 

contain the coronavirus. Western countries dispute this claim, arguing that China was not transparent 

and withheld information about its coronavirus situation. Other communist countries such as Viet Nam 

and Cuba followed different approaches. In Viet Nam, the buy-in was accepted with a sense of 



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patriotism (Alam, 2020). The country used a propaganda approach, aimed at convincing its citizens that 

the novel coronavirus was an enemy with whom they were at war and, to win that war, every citizen 

had to be patriotic and supportive of the cause (Alam, 2020). In the case of Cuba, the government made 

its citizens fully aware of the extreme danger of coronavirus disease and the consequent need to contain 

it (Mehmood, 2020). The Cuban government undertook a successful and cost-effective, door-to-door 

screening campaign.  

Citizen buy-in to stringent controls was significant in New Zealand (Parker, 2020), Uruguay (Mander, 

2020), Viet Nam (Dabla-Norris, Guide-Wolf and Painchaud, 2020), and Costa Rica (Medical Press, 

2020; UN News, 2020). In Uruguay, citizens agreed to stay at home without a mandatory lockdown. 

The exercise was performed smoothly without the need for police or the military to patrol the streets 

(Mander, 2020). From these examples, it cannot be disputed that when people themselves support the 

government action, as was the case in Uruguay, New Zealand and Costa Rica, the process is more 

likely to be sustainable. 

2.2 Well-focused Messages 

A second factor relates to public communications and messaging. Following the release of information 

about the pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO), various governments customized the 

information and translated it into their national and local languages, as appropriate, to enable their 

citizens to understand and participate in the solution. Ministries of health in each country were 

designated as focal points for the dissemination of official information. Since the outbreak of 

COVID-19, misinformation and disinformation have been the cause of the biggest bottlenecks. In this 

connection, Germany, Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay and other 

countries have done well in terms of sharing information with the public. For example, the Prime 

Minister of New Zealand has been credited with communicating with empathy the seriousness of 

COVID-19 and why it was necessary to have a national lockdown (Parker, 2020). This is also the case 

in Uruguay (Pribble, 2020) and Viet Nam (Alam, 2020; Pollack et al., 2020). The daily press briefings 

given by the health ministries have not only been critical in strengthening public trust, but have also 

helped societies to adhere to protective and containment strategies. Alam (2020) also notes that, in Viet 

Nam, anyone found spreading untruthful information causing public concern and social instability has 

been strictly dealt with. In China, the government requested some universities to develop 

easy-to-understand educational materials about COVID-19 and how to prevent its spread for students 

and the general public (Wu, Yu, & Wang, 2020). 

So far, one of the biggest challenges surrounding the coronavirus has been misinformation and 

disinformation coming from various sources, including political leaders such as President Bolsonaro of 

Brazil and President Trump of the USA. For developing countries, the way forward is to come up with 

bottom-up messages taking into account the level of education of each community. The examples of 



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Costa Rica and Uruguay (Medical Press, 2020), both middle-income but third world countries, are 

particularly instructive in this regard. 

2.3 Quick Response 

Third, once the coronavirus disease outbreak was announced by WHO, a number of countries 

immediately started preparations to mount a comprehensive response. For example, by 21 January 

2020, Viet Nam had finalized risk assessments and thereafter established a national steering committee 

on epidemic prevention to manage the coronavirus containment measures (Pollack et al., 2020). 

Similarly, Uruguay, with a population of 3.5 million people, immediately appointed a scientific 

commission to lead the response, including the establishment of 24 laboratories capable of carrying out 

tests (Mander, 2020). To date, the country has carried out over 400,000 tests and, as at 11 July 2020, 

had 986 cases of coronavirus and 30 deaths. In Costa Rica, the government established a committee 

involving all sectors of the economy, including the private sector. This committee was responsible for 

rolling out the government’s coronavirus containment measures (UN News, 2020). In Jordan, the 

government not only established a committee to combat the coronavirus disease, but also declared a 

state of emergency including a curfew and quarantine restrictions enforced by the military (Aytekin & 

Kabakci, 2020). Clearly, these positive examples indicate that the countries did not delay the decision 

to act once COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Again, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Viet Nam and 

Kerala state in India (Mathew, 2020) took quick decisions to stop the spread of the virus. Moreover, 

they made good progress in maintaining low numbers of positive cases and also low death rates 

(Beaubien, 2020).  

2.4 Testing and Contact Tracing 

A fourth factor understandably relates to the efficacy of testing and contact tracing. After people have 

been tested and found to be positive for COVID-19, comprehensive contact tracing is critical. For 

example, contact tracing by the Republic of Korea has been very effective (Aytekin & Kabakci, 2020), 

thanks to efforts by the government to scale up its network of contact tracers. In addition, the 

government has used public communication to empower citizens to assist the health systems with 

contact tracing (Aytekin & Kabakci, 2020). In Viet Nam, the contact tracing system is very thorough 

and the government has been able to trace contacts and to quarantine citizens suspected of carrying the 

virus (Alam, 2020). In Taiwan, the country has been using mobile SIMs for contact tracing and 

quarantining contacts to avoid the risk of them turning COVID-19-positive and infecting others, an 

approach that has proved to be very successful.  

Other countries which have done well in contact tracing include Iceland and Singapore. The success of 

Singapore has been based on the use of the national health service, police detectives and a 

contact-tracing application to track the spread of the virus (Yea, 2020). In some countries, however, 

people who being tested have given incorrect contact details, making it very difficult to trace their 



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contacts if they test positive. Kenya has been confronted with this problem (Kabale, 2020). Other 

countries that have fared badly in contact tracing include Brazil and the USA. Testing alone, without 

contact tracing and isolation, has little impact. In short, thorough contact tracing can help to facilitate a 

targeted containment strategy and in turn save lives. 

2.5 Strong Health-care Systems 

Fifth, the countries that are doing well so far in containing COVID-19 can ascribe this success in part 

to strong health-care systems. According to Wieler, Rexroth and Gottschalk (2020), Germany’s success 

rate is a result of the county’s strong enabling environment, which includes a good public health-care 

system and expert scientific institutions. Similarly, Uruguay has fared well because of its strong public 

health-care system (Mander, 2020). Uruguay has the highest number of hospital beds per person in 

Latin America. Cuba is another country with a robust health-care system, which has complemented 

efforts to contain the coronavirus disease. According to Mehmood (2020), Cuba has a strong primary 

health-care system and almost 87 percents of COVID-19 patients have recovered, the highest recovery 

rate in South America. For its part, Viet Nam has invested in public health infrastructure (in particular, 

emergency centres and surveillance systems) based on the lessons learned from the SARS and Avian 

influenza epidemics (Dabla-Norris, Guide-Wolf, & Painchaud, 2020). In the case of Taiwan, the 

success can be correlated with its innovative electronic health records system: every person in Taiwan 

has a health identity card that all hospitals and doctors can access (Emanuel, Zhang, & Glickman, 

2020). When COVID-19 hit the country, the cards were reprogrammed to support efforts to limit the 

spread of the disease. Another instructive example is furnished by Rwanda, which has a strengthened 

health-care system with well-coordinated prevention measures against COVID-19. Thanks to these, the 

country has been able to record zero deaths from the disease (Condo, Uwizihiwe and Nsanzimana 

(2020). Moreover, the national community health-care network, with the support of the private sector, 

has enabled the government to identify areas that need to be targeted. Similarly, Costa Rica, which 

provides another good example, has a robust, universal health-care system which covers approximately 

95 per cent of the population and which has assisted in containing the coronavirus disease in the 

country (UN News, 2020). In short, countries that lack adequate health-care systems, such as Brazil, 

India, the Russian Federation, South Africa and other developing countries, national responses to the 

coronavirus disease are severely constrained.  

 

3. Challenges of Inequality 

The five factors highlighted above share a single and important common denominator. The countries 

that have made good progress so far are those that have been able to reduce the inequalities between the 

rich and the poor. Mander (2020) confirms that Uruguay, for example, has been able to contain 

COVID-19 thanks to its reduced gap between the rich and the poor. In addition, a large proportion of 



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the Uruguayan population is well educated, with the ability to understand and respect the government 

directives about staying at home, observing social distancing, and sanitizing and washing hands. This 

was achieved without any form of lockdown.  

In contrast, in other countries such as India, Kenya and South Africa, governments are struggling to 

contain the rising number of cases of COVID-19. The areas hardest hit in those countries are the 

informal settlements or slums within the major cities which are home to most of the poor and illiterate 

population. As a rule, slum dwellers have very low incomes and lack access to government-provided 

social safety nets. Under these circumstances, people in these settlements have found it difficult to 

respect government health directives—notably lockdowns—occasioned by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In South Africa, the government had to bring in the military to enforce the lockdown. As Sachs (2020) 

argues, the higher inequality rates in these countries mean that a larger proportion of their low-income 

workers, including cleaners, cashiers, guards, delivery staff, and construction and factory workers, must 

continue their daily work, even at the risk of COVID-19 infection. Widened inequality also results in 

more people living in crowded conditions and therefore being unable to shelter safely. The areas that 

suffered the worst casualties in New York and London were the poor neighbourhoods (Strandberg, 

2020). To make matters worse, the pandemic is further widening inequalities in many developing 

countries, notably those that already suffer from inept governance, corruption and social distrust. 

 

4. Conclusion 

The issues discussed above are all intertwined. Successful countries have benefited from their adoption 

of a combination of some or all of the more effective response measures. No doubt the main lesson to 

be learned from this country comparison is that, if the war against COVID-19 or any future infectious 

disease is to be won, countries need a well-functioning and effective primary health-care system that 

can identify and respond quickly to emerging health challenges, disseminate accurate and transparent 

public health information, and undertake testing and contact tracing in a rapid and cost-effective 

manner to reduce the spread of the disease. Such a well-run health system will ensure buy-in from the 

public and offer the best chance of containing future pandemics.  

 

Disclaimer 

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author and not 

necessarily to AFICS-Kenya. 

 

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