We are all capable of changing how we behave – just look at Asians

Nothing skews reason like a bit of old-fashioned prejudice. The charts above show dramatic differences in the way countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan have responded to the epidemic compared to others in Europe.

While the picture here is of exponential growth, the lines showing the spread of the virus in parts of Asia are flatter, suggesting the response there has been more effective. Even China, which was caught on the hop in Wuhan, has managed to dramatically subdue the spread of the disease. If such containment has been successful in places like Singapore, why is the Government here not looking to replicate it? Boris Johnson says he too wants to flatten the curve of the epidemic, but his ambition is more modest.

Rather than spread it over six months or more, as they are aiming to do in parts of Asia, he wants to push it back a month or so into the summer and then let things rip. Most people will catch it and “many more families are going to lose loved ones”, but Britain will have acquired “herd immunity” and we will have got it over with, says his scientific advisers.

It all feels a bit biff, bang, bosh. The answer, it seems, sits with an Alf Garnett reading of our national temperament, and by reflection that of people in Asia.

While behaviour change is possible in the UK, it can only be maintained for a short period before “fatigue” and noncompliance set in, explained Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer yesterday. Put a ban on football matches and the masses will just decamp to the pub, added Susan Michie, a professor of health psychology and co-director of the Behavioural Sciences Policy Research Unit for England and Wales.

Here is the other side of that coin. In authoritarian states like China, people are well used to doing what they are told and if they don’t they end up in a gulag. And people don’t value individual freedoms over there in the same way we do, don’t you know? How else can one explain the sustained behavioural change in democractic Taiwan and South Korea?

Those Asians, they are different, more submissive, the ugly trope goes. This is little more than stereotype and prejudice. People in Asia are no more subservient than we are fickle. They are behaving differently not because they have been coerced or are intrinsically different, but because they have been here before.

In 2003, Sars, a coronavirus with a kill rate, not of 1-3 per cent, but 10 per cent, swept out of China and across the region. The speed and ferocity of the epidemic was terrifying. It infected 8,098 people and killed 774 before it could be quelled. My father was in Hong Kong at the time and saw the first DNA sequence of the virus. “The doctors treating people were not going home at night. They were protecting their families,” he recalls.

People in Asia learnt from Sars. They learnt how viruses spread and how to protect yourself and others through good hygiene and social distancing.

They learnt how to adjust their lives in ways we in the West have not had to do in living memory. It’s not that we can’t do it but we are not practised.

If you listen to radio interviews with ordinary people in lockdown areas of Asia, you tend not to hear moaning, but the reassuring voices of people getting by in difficult circumstances. Stories of neighbours helping each other. Pride in doctors and nurses. And praise for the authorities who are keeping essential services running with a skeleton staff.

At the peak of the outbreak in Wuhan, residents shouted encouragement to each other at night from their apartment windows, boosting the city’s morale. Then yesterday, from Turin to Naples, Italians started singing to each other from their balconies.

This is not science, but as the UK Government moves forward it might point its behavioural scientists in the direction of some of these more positive observations.

It is no doubt true, as the nudge theorists hold, that much human behaviour is instinctive rather than rational, but we are all capable of sustained positive change given the right circumstances and leadership.

As the epidemic closes in on us in Britain, it is a fact that the lives of many of our parents and grandparents will be in peril. And when the dust settles in six to 12 months time and league tables of fatality rates appear we will know how well we responded.

There are many reasons why we may not end up at the top of that list but let’s make sure it is not because we didn’t ask enough of ourselves as a nation.