This article investigates the nuanced and disaggregated role of state and civil society in the fight against COVID-19 in Hong Kong and Singapore through a comparative policy study. Hong Kong and Singapore provide two contrasting cases of state-society interaction under the framework of Political Nexus Triads (PNT). Hong Kong combats COVID-19 with greater dependence on its civil society and bureaucrats, while Singapore relies more on a state-centred approach. They represent the diversity of state-society relations and multiple configurational causality in the COVID-19 responses and question the efficacy of any single and contextless model.