The Art of State-Societal Reconfiguration in a Time of Pandemic Crisis: A Health System Resilience Typology and Comparative Analysis Between Transcending Nations (the US, UK, and India) and Coping Nations (South Korea and Taiwan)

This paper examines and reviews three years of the preventive measures taken by different countries, which led us to frame the most effective mitigation and coping mechanisms that were deployed to cushion the impact of Covid-19 outbreaks on respective health systems. Measures taken by five countries (the United States, United Kingdom, India, South Korea, and Taiwan) are used as case studies. We delineate the resilience measures within the scope of “coping” and “transcending.” The elucidation of these measures is demarcated into three control phases: feedforward control, concurrent control, and feedback control. Our review reveals that the US, UK, and India struggled as a result of chaotic coordination by their public health systems to cope with high admission rates of Covid-19-infected patients; however, they possessed the ability to learn swiftly and to identify and produce vaccine candidates to transcend the crisis. Meanwhile, South Korea and Taiwan were found to have the ability to cope with the upheavals they encountered during the pandemic crisis. The holistic framework of resilience measures we derive may be instrumental to policy makers, public health specialists, and researchers, setting out as it does the coping and transcending abilities within the context of a learning society.