I am open to the idea that compliance in some parts of the world has been worse than others. But an annoyance I have with pieces like this is that they obscure the fact that *superior systems actually punish noncompliance*. They are not just voluntary. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-55280321

A man in my apartment building in HK absconded from an isolation order. They knew because they tagged him! I didn't have an opportunity to decide not to isolate when a friend caught Covid... because I was picked up and taken to a designated quarantine facility.

The UK has a threadbare contact tracing system and relies on a lot of practically voluntary compliance - way more than the countries which have done well. Given the govt has repeatedly displayed it doesn't have control over it, voluntary compliance *can* be a bit of a mug's game

Again I don't want to diminish the fact that people do abscond, are unpleasant, won't always obet - the point of having like, policies and governance and stuff is aligning individual impulses with the collective good, where the two are at odds. The world doesn't run on goodwill.

It's quite possible the West couldn't have managed this (I disagree but there's no point in arguing it now) - but that doesn't change the fact that the model they've pursued cannot work, by design. You don't fix coordination/collective action problems by just whining at people.