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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 u

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
    > All of this is in context of most infection being new, all of it. No. The average time to die after infection is 28 days. Korea has been testing aggressively, and 28 days ago had fewer than 50 cases, despite finding cases earlier in their development. These other countries found cases who were already infected longer. That's why they have more deaths but also why they have more recoveries. You cannot gauge effectiveness of treatment until you've given the treated time to recover or die. > This makes sense to me but can indeed only be verified once this whole horrible scenario plays out. This can be verified today by the lower number of recoveries.
    - joe_the_user 7y ago
      > These other countries found cases who were already infected longer. That's why they have more deaths but also why they have more recoveries. Yeah, and as I already noted, this situation MEANS that these other countries are failing to control the infection because they are finding infections late, which is going to mean more deaths later. > You cannot gauge effectiveness of treatment until you've given the treated time to recover or die. Sure, I shouldn't imply Korea does just better treatment rather than that the treatment/test combination regime of Korea seems like the superior model relative to other countries and I think have mostly said that. We can see notably that the infection rate in Korea has dropped off markedly in the last few days.

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
  > All of this is in context of most infection being new, all of it. No. The average time to die after infection is 28 days. Korea has been testing aggressively, and 28 days ago had fewer than 50 cases, despite finding cases earlier in their development. These other countries found cases who were already infected longer. That's why they have more deaths but also why they have more recoveries. You cannot gauge effectiveness of treatment until you've given the treated time to recover or die. > This makes sense to me but can indeed only be verified once this whole horrible scenario plays out. This can be verified today by the lower number of recoveries.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    > These other countries found cases who were already infected longer. That's why they have more deaths but also why they have more recoveries. Yeah, and as I already noted, this situation MEANS that these other countries are failing to control the infection because they are finding infections late, which is going to mean more deaths later. > You cannot gauge effectiveness of treatment until you've given the treated time to recover or die. Sure, I shouldn't imply Korea does just better treatment rather than that the treatment/test combination regime of Korea seems like the superior model relative to other countries and I think have mostly said that. We can see notably that the infection rate in Korea has dropped off markedly in the last few days.