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1) China and Korea have effectively treated the virus, infections in both those areas have been declining. And Korea now is effectively the lowest fatality rate

1) China and Korea have effectively treated the virus, infections in both those areas have been declining. And Korea now is effectively the lowest fatality rate for any of the effected countries which points to excellent surveillance and treatment. I darn well intent to keep pointing to this. 2) Some article point to the main vector in Italy being patient left in a hospital for 36 hour before being diagnosed and treated. This allowed the disease to spread in the community where testing was not being done - kind of like the US. 3) The Chinese test may indeed might have had problems at various points (your first link is rather anecdotal, hardly proves the test was a "coin flip". Other posters note your links don't back your arguments). The American test had even more problems and still hasn't ramped up to strong production. Making tests is hard, it seems. The CDC's "your test has problems and we know we can do better" attitude looks misguided in retrospect. 4) It seems like you're doing a bunch of speculation with little evidence. I suggest you look at infection and mortality as a basis for thinking about what country is doing well or badly. [1] [1] https://covid19info.live/ https://covid19info.live/

lern_too_spel 7y ago
> And Korea now is effectively the lowest fatality rate for any of the effected countries which points to excellent surveillance and treatment. I darn well intent to keep pointing to this. That's misleading. Korea has the highest active case ratio of any of the hardest hit countries. The flip side of the lowest CFR coin is that Korea also has by far the lowest recovery rate of any of those countries. You need to wait for the active cases to turn into deaths or recoveries. From JHU CSSE: South Korea Confirmed: 7,382 Deaths: 50 Recovered: 118 Existing: 7,214 If you're just looking at recovery rate (also misleading), Iran seems much better than Korea: Iran Confirmed: 6,566 Deaths: 194 Recovered: 2,134 Existing: 4,238
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  I don't know what the criteria for recovery is. My impression is there isn't much of a international standard and so the inter-country comparisons aren't that useful. Iran might have a higher recovery rate but that might be more an artifact of how they measure this. In all other measure, South Korea is doing well. Avoiding death is much unambiguous a measure. Edit: Yes, because Korea has experienced an exponential increase in cases, most cases in Korea are "new" but this is true for most other countries - though countries where they only find cases by people dying might be different but not in a good way. Edit2: Also, it is true that Korea's lower mortality is likely partly a product of Korea's widely testing and finding asymptomatic carriers. But this is also a good thing since it allows Korea to get these people to quarantine and lower the transmission rate, hence the declining rate of infection there.
  - Lucadg 7y ago
    Numbers per country in general are really hard to evaluate as there is no standard for anything. Confirmed cases: heavily dependent on tested people. 1500 in US vs 100k in S. Korea makes the comparison useless. Also, who is tested? In Italy they started testing only symptomatic people after a while. China has changed the parameters a few times in these last weeks. Deaths: are all deceased people tested? Recoveries: what constitutes as a recovery? Highly variable on a per country basis. I wonder if WHO has published some standards.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > Edit: Yes, because Korea has experienced an exponential increase in cases, most cases in Korea are "new" but this is true for most other countries - though countries where they only find cases by people dying might be different but not in a good way. That is the whole point of my comment. There are many countries that would appear to be even better than Korea by your naive interpretation of CFR. Germany, India, Russia, Brazil, Iceland, Mexico, and many other countries have 0% CFR. That just means that like in Korea, the infected haven't had time enough to die. Once again, "You need to wait for the active cases to turn into deaths or recoveries."
    - joe_the_user 7y ago
      The difference is countries widely affected by the virus; Italy and Iran. They too have exponential grow of cases and would logically lots of new cases. Sure, countries that don't enough cases shouldn't be compared but countries with an equivalent growth pattern make sense to compare. At the same time, we can look at the total outside China fetal rate and that's about 2%, which again Korea is doing notably better than. All of this is in context of most infection being new, all of it. Sure, CFR may not be the final rate one sees but that doesn't mean it doesn't give significant information about what's happening. The point I've been arguing is that the Korean strategy involves finding asymptomatic cases and preventing these becoming more symptomatic cases by quarantining them, getting those exposed tested and so-forth. One possibility is this means more of those they find are not seriously ill and won't become seriously ill and this reduces the overall CFR, which can be seen in a comparison to other nations with equivalent numbers of infections. This makes sense to me but can indeed only be verified once this whole horrible scenario plays out.

lern_too_spel 7y ago

> And Korea now is effectively the lowest fatality rate for any of the effected countries which points to excellent surveillance and treatment. I darn well intent to keep pointing to this. That's misleading. Korea has the highest active case ratio of any of the hardest hit countries. The flip side of the lowest CFR coin is that Korea also has by far the lowest recovery rate of any of those countries. You need to wait for the active cases to turn into deaths or recoveries. From JHU CSSE: South Korea Confirmed: 7,382 Deaths: 50 Recovered: 118 Existing: 7,214 If you're just looking at recovery rate (also misleading), Iran seems much better than Korea: Iran Confirmed: 6,566 Deaths: 194 Recovered: 2,134 Existing: 4,238

joe_the_user 7y ago
I don't know what the criteria for recovery is. My impression is there isn't much of a international standard and so the inter-country comparisons aren't that useful. Iran might have a higher recovery rate but that might be more an artifact of how they measure this. In all other measure, South Korea is doing well. Avoiding death is much unambiguous a measure. Edit: Yes, because Korea has experienced an exponential increase in cases, most cases in Korea are "new" but this is true for most other countries - though countries where they only find cases by people dying might be different but not in a good way. Edit2: Also, it is true that Korea's lower mortality is likely partly a product of Korea's widely testing and finding asymptomatic carriers. But this is also a good thing since it allows Korea to get these people to quarantine and lower the transmission rate, hence the declining rate of infection there.
- Lucadg 7y ago
  Numbers per country in general are really hard to evaluate as there is no standard for anything. Confirmed cases: heavily dependent on tested people. 1500 in US vs 100k in S. Korea makes the comparison useless. Also, who is tested? In Italy they started testing only symptomatic people after a while. China has changed the parameters a few times in these last weeks. Deaths: are all deceased people tested? Recoveries: what constitutes as a recovery? Highly variable on a per country basis. I wonder if WHO has published some standards.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > Edit: Yes, because Korea has experienced an exponential increase in cases, most cases in Korea are "new" but this is true for most other countries - though countries where they only find cases by people dying might be different but not in a good way. That is the whole point of my comment. There are many countries that would appear to be even better than Korea by your naive interpretation of CFR. Germany, India, Russia, Brazil, Iceland, Mexico, and many other countries have 0% CFR. That just means that like in Korea, the infected haven't had time enough to die. Once again, "You need to wait for the active cases to turn into deaths or recoveries."
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    The difference is countries widely affected by the virus; Italy and Iran. They too have exponential grow of cases and would logically lots of new cases. Sure, countries that don't enough cases shouldn't be compared but countries with an equivalent growth pattern make sense to compare. At the same time, we can look at the total outside China fetal rate and that's about 2%, which again Korea is doing notably better than. All of this is in context of most infection being new, all of it. Sure, CFR may not be the final rate one sees but that doesn't mean it doesn't give significant information about what's happening. The point I've been arguing is that the Korean strategy involves finding asymptomatic cases and preventing these becoming more symptomatic cases by quarantining them, getting those exposed tested and so-forth. One possibility is this means more of those they find are not seriously ill and won't become seriously ill and this reduces the overall CFR, which can be seen in a comparison to other nations with equivalent numbers of infections. This makes sense to me but can indeed only be verified once this whole horrible scenario plays out.