Reframing COVID‐19 Health Vulnerability in Selected Asian Countries: An Exploratory SDG‐Aligned Sustainability Framework

ABSTRACT

Understanding how countries navigate large‐scale health crises requires attention not only to epidemiological indicators but also to the social, economic, and institutional conditions that shape response capacity. This exploratory country‐level comparative paper develops an SDG‐aligned framework to examine COVID‐19 vulnerability across eight purposively selected Asian countries: Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Iraq, Japan, Kazakhstan, and South Korea. The framework integrates three dimensions—social sustainability, economic‐resource sustainability, and integrated health outcomes—using normalized cross‐national indicators. The analysis combines descriptive comparison, exploratory clustering, and decision‐tree classification to identify vulnerability profiles and policy‐relevant patterns. Given the small country‐level sample, clustering results are interpreted as heuristic profile groupings rather than stable or generalizable classes for Asia as a whole. The findings suggest that governance quality, demographic structure, health‐system coping capacity, and vaccination and testing performance are associated with differences in observed national vulnerability patterns. Importantly, several countries that entered the pandemic with comparatively stronger structural conditions did not sustain these advantages uniformly during the pandemic period, indicating that baseline capacity and realized response performance should be analytically distinguished. The study's contribution lies in operationally linking SDG‐related structural conditions with health‐response metrics within a single comparative framework for selected Asian countries, thereby providing an exploratory complement to broader pandemic preparedness and risk‐assessment instruments rather than replacing them.