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This is correct. This is how South Korea stopped it - early testing and isolation followed by contact tracing to test them too. Think about it this way. The
by T-hawk 7y ago
This is correct. This is how South Korea stopped it - early testing and isolation followed by contact tracing to test them too.
Think about it this way. The Ro spread factor is somewhere between 2.2 and 3.0 by most reports. People are contagious for 7 to 14 days before they know it. Therefore every infected person spreads a new case only once every 2 to 5 days on average. The problem isn't that the virus is explosively contagious per-interaction (measles is higher), it's that the incubation period is so long across so many interactions.
Cut that recognition time from that 7-14 days to 2, cut off those interactions, and that's how you get Ro below 1 to stop it. That's what South Korea did, by way of both rapid testing and contact tracing to test them too. Reports are that their rapid test gives false positives of up to 10%, but that's okay, a false positive is much less consequential than a false negative.
What jurisdictions in the Western world have the means and will to implement that remains to be seen.
- ttul 7y agoThis is the most excellent description of South Korea’s efforts I have read so far.
- hilbertseries 7y agoMedian incubation period is 5 days, 95 percent of cases are 2-14 days.
- unishark 7y agoAre you sure the tests can detect the virus two days after exposure? One reason the CDC advises quarantine and waiting for symptoms before testing is because they aren't sure it can be detected before symptoms start. Though I guess whenever you are producing enough virus to be contagious you would probably test positive at that point too.
- T-hawk 7y agoI'm not sure; that 2 days number was what I thought I'd read about South Korea's test, but could be wrong. At any rate, that's an approximation. The key point is for the average testing and isolation interval to be shorter than the average time to pass on a new case, whatever that interval actually is. If that happens, then it's stoppable.