46 ms·

Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

194 points by Reedx 7y ago

neonate 7y ago
https://archive.md/0Kygf https://archive.md/0Kygf
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  This is an archive of the above article. Thank you!
makomk 7y ago
This worries me. South Korea's mass testing alone was not enough to contain the coronavirus outbreak; they relied on social distancing measures too: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-southkorea/south-korea-extends-intensive-social-distancing-to-reach-50-daily-coronavirus-cases-idUSKBN21M02P https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-southk...
- ajross 7y ago
  Yes, but once the outbreak is at a low enough level, and you have sufficient test bandwidth, you can manage it via testing and tracing. Everyone who gets sick, with anything, gets tested (in some variants of the plan every everywhere gets tested every N days). If you find a positive, quarantine them and test everyone they came in contact with. Repeat. This reduces the rate of spread by catching community transmission before the end of its cycle. And it's worked with other outbreaks in the past. But it depends on having a very large available pool of rapid testing, so you can't do it when you have thousands of cases per day. But a few dozen... probably. It definitely seems to be working in Korea. But again, it only works once the outbreak is well contained. Stay home.
  - makomk 7y ago
    The trouble is, reducing the size of the outbreak doesn't affect the number of tests needed to do this much at all, and the number of people South Korea has been testing doesn't seem to have increased in quite a while. In fact, it seems to have actually decreased compared to back in March. Like, as far as I can tell, they're still using the same contact tracing and testing strategy that failed to contain it before without additional strong social distancing, and the social distancing is weakening.
  - api 7y ago
    That is very labor intensive and isn't sustainable. People will get complacent fast.
    - jeremyjh 7y ago
      It is a lot more sustainable than the alternatives.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - usaar333 7y ago
    > But it depends on having a very large available pool of rapid testing Not necessarily. You can just aggressively quarantine - basically the strategy in China. > so you can't do it when you have thousands of cases per day At what scale? Iceland was able to do it with ~200 new cases per day per million. The majority of US states haven't had spikes this high - nowhere in CA has even come close to that. For some reason, we've only recently started building up the volunteer armies needed to do this (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-coronavirus-contact-tracing-case-15199505.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-coronav...) - this should have been done on day 1.
    - ajross 7y ago
      > Iceland was able to do it Iceland's per capita new infection rate peaked higher than basically any nation in the world, and while it's dropping comparatively rapidly it hasn't reached a stable baseline yet. I don't think this is a good example at all. While it's clear their lockdown "worked" (in the sense of recovering them from a disastrous peak), I think it's still very much an open question as to whether their testing capacity will sustain this success.
      - usaar333 7y ago
        case rate, not infection rate. They are one of the few nations in the world that are credibly even close to catching half their infections. The US is probably missing 90% (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.06.20055582v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.06.20055582v...) To that point, their death rate is lower than the Bay Area. To a second point, Iceland is under a very weak lockdown, if you can even call it that. Their elementary schools remain open.
        cma 7y ago
        Through mass testing they already avoided one nursing home hit, and haven’t had a single hit. If they do, their fatality rate could quadruple because of how small the numbers are we are looking at there.
- narrator 7y ago
  South Korea: 234 deaths 8042 recovered. China: 4632 deaths, 77k recovered[1]. Their treatment protocol is an order of magnitude better than every other country. What are they doing that we're not? This is a huge glaring discrepancy. What's the difference between their treatment protocols and everyone else's? [1]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
  - usaar333 7y ago
    https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china+population+%2F+south+korea+population https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china+population+%2F+s... Actually worse than China by that metric, though given credibility issues of Chinese data, let's just say about the same.
  - rhino369 7y ago
    The "recovered" numbers in other countries aren't even close to accurate. Countries with large outbreaks are only testing people with severe symptoms. Korea is testing anyone who comes near someone with the virus. So are catching close to everyone who has it.
  - yfzhou 7y ago
    Western countries most likely still aren't testing mild patients. SK and China went for full containment: every single positive case is hospitalized and close contacts are quarantined in hotels so few cases are missed. While in New York, hospitals are focused on saving critical patients. If you test positive but have mild symptoms, you are usually let home anyway so it doesn't really make sense to test most people who would be taken very seriously in Asia.
  - varjag 7y ago
    > China: 4632 deaths, 77k recovered There are zero deaths and zero cases in Turkmenistan, must have gotten their treatment protocols tight.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    What's the difference between their treatment protocols and everyone else's? It's mind boggling anyone has to ask now this has been going on so long but here goes. 1) They had an approach plan beforehand because they had observed the previous SARS epidemic and took the danger seriously. 2) They had "quarantine hotels" freely available for those who were positive to prevent them from infecting others. (Seattle has a few of these, I've heard but they aren't widespread in the US. The idea of housing people freely is anethema to the US.) 3) They did testing early and often. 4) Their doctors and nurses worked with full PPEs, full anti-contamination suits, so they didn't themselves massively spread the illness. 5) They reserved hospitals specifically for the epidemic and had protocols for sending people to these hotel. 6) They had drive through testing and other testing easily and freely available (the US plan of profiting from testing is just so "I can't even"). 7) They did systematic contact tracing with an app for people to discover where infectious people had been. 8) They did social distancing with mask from the start. -- The US had literally done NONE of this. What the US has done is last-ditch efforts by states after the ostensibly responsible parties (the CDC etc) failed massively. And the Federal government is now literally sabotaging the states.
Benmcdonald__ 7y ago
3 new cases of coronavirus in Korea today 1 person has died this year from coronavirus in Seoul Looks to be near the end of the outbreak for Korea
- coldcode 7y ago
  The US will hit 40,000 deaths today.
  - dpau 7y ago
    and 22 million unemployed
    - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
      For businesses that will probably never return.
      - lmeyerov 7y ago
        They'll be replaced, but the owners, employees, and loved ones who die won't.
        crimsonalucard 7y ago
        Why the hell is this voted down? It's true. There is a sacrifice that must be made between saving lives and saving businesses that is very real. Ideally we want to save lives but there will be a line drawn somewhere where we must open up businesses again.
        collyw 7y ago
        I have to agree on this. Just go to any country with a poorly functioning economic system, the healthcare matches it.
        7y ago
FlorianRappl 7y ago
South Korea demonstrated from the beginning on how to deal with this (despite their slow start - which still is super quick compared to most western countries). But its completely wrong to think they passed it. They also have massive impediments at the moment. Back to normal? Far from it.
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  But people are still working and their economy is still running. This is a HUGE improvement over what we have currently in the USA.
  - throw_away 7y ago
    & just looking at the raw data, they seem to have a waaay better solution than we do: https://imgur.com/a/2T0GVoe https://imgur.com/a/2T0GVoe from http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ if anyone wants to compare other stats.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      A significant part of the lower peak is the earlier intervention. There's similar patterns if you compare between US states.
    - usaar333 7y ago
      They had really good contact tracing. I'm not even sure how much we're attempting this in the US. "Lockdowns" without contact tracing is taking the path of "herd immunity for essential workers"
  - killIdeas 7y ago
    The current narrative is that anyone who thinks this quarentine is poorly managed is a Trump supporter. This couldn't be further from the truth. They have made it political.
    - 7y ago
ldng 7y ago
On the other hand, they have something like 65 re-infected people. Could it be that they have a different/new strain ? Edit I don't see why the downvotes. It is easily fact-checkable. Those 65 persons were hospitalized for their symptoms, considered treated and released and about 2 weeks later showed symptoms again.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
  We need to wait until we have antibody testing to get a clear picture about this. A theory is that these asymptomatic cases simply had latent virus in their nasal passages (thus testing positive), and not actually be building any antibodies from an infection.
  - bb2018 7y ago
    Yeah - Id love to know if there are any cases where someone was sick enough that they were treated, recovered, and then got sick enough they need actual treatment again.
  - jeremyjh 7y ago
    About half of the reinfected have symptoms.
narrator 7y ago
Yup
- zamfi 7y ago
  > Bill Gates has literally been preparing the last 20 years to make enormous amounts of money on a forced vaccination program Is this one of those conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing about? Bill Gates’ foundation has been giving away money for decades. If you think he’s planning to make a bunch of money off “forced vaccination”, you’re stuck in the past — Gates doesn’t care about making more money, he cares about getting the respect of his peer group & broader society. He’s not going to earn money off this, he’s going to earn respect. That has nothing to do with “forced” vaccination, and everything to do with (the perception of) saving lives otherwise lost to this virus. If he funds a real vaccine, whether forced or not, he’ll accomplish his goal. Please, leave the shortsighted “greed” conspiracy theories off this site.
  - stevenwoo 7y ago
    I do not believe any conspiracy theory about Gates and vaccines or anything else. But his comment about voting for Trump if the other candidate raise his taxes too much doesn't support the non greed argument ( he reiterated it after saying he was kidding with a straw man argument). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMMZ1Qzr1ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMMZ1Qzr1ag
  - bb2018 7y ago
    Perhaps it would indulge the conspiracy theories too much - but I'd kinda love to see an actual breakdown of how something like this could ever make him money. Think of the huge amount of money he has lost from this in the other businesses he owns and think of all the money he invested in this for decades he could have invested in other lucrative industries. How much would he need from this supposed plan to even breakeven? Thirty billion?
    - tedunangst 7y ago
      That's why it's called a conspiracy theory, not a consistency theory.
Aretas77 7y ago
Won't this reignite the spreading of the virus? Like, they missed a few people who were asymptotic and not tested, and are roaming the streets with other people?
- microcolonel 7y ago
  No, because they test people regularly and do accurate contact tracing. Thanks to a favourable regulatory environment and a profusion of capable people, South Korea scaled up testing and tracing capacity very rapidly. Furthermore, they were socially prepared to do the basic social distancing. Also, Taiwan has done an excellent job, and they didn't need to perform nearly as many tests. AFAIK there hasn't been a single additional confirmed case in Taiwan for the last three days.
  - colmvp 7y ago
    Taiwan also has a lot of preventative measures, i.e. mandatory mask usage in mass transit systems, government issued masks and mask rationing system, automated temperature checks at various public spaces, mask usage in schools, plastic dividers at restaurants... on top of that they have a very sophisticated scalable method of tracking people who have the virus and ensuring that they are abiding by quarantine rules via tracing the location of their cell phone. In my city, people are still arguing whether or not people in the mass transit system should be wearing masks.
    - clairity 7y ago
      what are the arguments against wearing masks on transit? i’m no fan of masks, but wearing them on mass transit (of any kind) makes sense. lots of random people in a relatively small, enclosed, and cramped airspace elevates transmission risk materially (as opposed to wearing them outside, where it’s negligible).
- Benmcdonald__ 7y ago
  Won't change as Korea never had a lock down and people were always going to cafes/restaurants
teapourer 7y ago
To be clear, the Korean government officially still recommends social distancing. They are especially worried about the family picnics mentioned in the article, and have officially closed many public parks in response. To repeat: don't take this as a sign that Korea believes it has successfully managed the outbreak.
- colmvp 7y ago
  I'm actually slightly worried as Singapore seemed to have handled the crisis quite well with only 1000ish cases for the longest time, but have now had cases balloon from only around 1350 total cases two weeks ago to 6000 today. Certainly, a lot of it has to with migrant workers and their living situations, but it also underscores how even when you have things under control, the virus can spread rapidly when your guard is down.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    Same thing is true for Japan. Everything seems fine for a while, and suddenly the numbers explode.
    - Chunklight 7y ago
      Mysteriously right after the Olympics were postponed.
      - tooltalk 7y ago
        Nobody believed Japan. Trump had to call Abe to consider postponement and Canada was the first country to announce they wouldn't send their athletics to the summer Olympics in Tokyo on March 22.
    - yongjik 7y ago
      Couldn't find a better page, but according to a past version of wikipedia table[1], as of Mar 31, Japan had tested 32,497 people. The US had tested 1,108,500; South Korea, 410,564. A lot of people were perplexed by Japan's lack of testing. Seems like Japan's strategy (whatever it was) didn't work out in the end. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:COVID-19_testing_by_country&oldid=948428786 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:COVID-19...
melling 7y ago
South Korea started testing very early: “South Korea's foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, speaking to the BBC last week, said the key lessons from her country are that it developed testing for the virus even before it had a significant number of cases. "In mid-January, our health authorities quickly conferred with the research institutions here [to develop a test]," Kang said. "And then they shared that result with the pharmaceutical companies, who then produced the reagent [chemical] and the equipment needed for the testing."
LordHumungous 7y ago
Does it show the success of their approach? Given that new cases hit the hospitals 2 weeks after exposure it seems like it is far too soon to know that. Also, over what timeline are we talking? South Korea has fewer deaths now, will that be the case in two years time? I've seen a lot of articles lately drawing conclusions from the state of the world as it exists now. But this is a highly dynamic situation. Today's assumptions are next month's fallacies. We need more humility.
dominotw 7y ago
how was south korea able to scale up their testing so fast. Where did the extra testing capacity come from. I've been really curious about this but haven't seen any good answers so far.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  All rich countries have been able to scale up their testing similarly quickly, once they decided it was a national priority to do so.
  - dominotw 7y ago
    then how come all rich countries don't have 'mass testing success' like the article claims happened in south korea.
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      They took a long time to decide it was a national priority. At the point when Korea started heavily ramping up its testing program, most Western countries took roughly the same approach they took during SARS, where they contact traced and tested only the few cases they knew about with the expectation that'd be enough.
      - dominotw 7y ago
        I am unable to find any reliable data that shows the ramp up of testing capacity after deciding its a national priority by country. What is the basis for 'similarly quickly' ? Sibling comment to your original comment seems to suggest US wasn't able to 'similarly quickly' due to lack of onsite manufacturing. Even the article suggests this, > The country was testing people for the virus at the fastest pace in the world
        SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        I can't find the data off the top of my head, but in the middle of March the US was able to ramp up from barely 1k tests a day to 100k within a week or two. It's my understanding that Germany went comparably fast.
BurningFrog 7y ago
Meanwhile, the US still has very little testing capacity, with no signs of if and when that will change. One problem with the death of journalism is that no one is even reporting on this.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Lots of people are reporting on this - I'm not sure where you're looking that you're missing it.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    It's entirely possible I have missed something, and I'd love some links! I'm especially looking for reporting on why it's so slow, what the bottlenecks are, and who's responsible. Even if there is some good reporting out there, I think this should me one of the main news items in a healthy society. I have seen reporting on the bungling of the initial testing rollout, like this one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/contamination-at-cdc-lab-delayed-rollout-of-coronavirus-tests/2020/04/18/fd7d3824-7139-11ea-aa80-c2470c6b2034_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/contamination-...
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      This article for example was on the CNN front page, explaining that the major bottlenecks are test swabs and the required reagents and describing a specific FDA action which the governor of Ohio thinks would solve his problems. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/...
      - BurningFrog 7y ago
        Thanks! That is better than I've seen. I'm still missing anything beyond summarizing what officials have said. The Ohio Governor blaming FDA regulations is the closest to an analysis in there.
pcr910303 7y ago
Very surprised to find out country (city) in HN's top page! For people who are interested in current Korea's situation: There were 18 new cases two days ago, and 8 new cases yesterday. The number of new cases have been consistently falling since April 14th. 'Intense social distancing' was stopped yesterday (April 19th), and the Korean government is planning to drop the 'social distancing' policy on May 5th. Schools are planned to open on May 6th, and the ban of churches, bars, etc. are expected to be dropped in the following days (probably tomorrow). The KCDC is saying that to drop the 'social distancing', there should consistently have less than 30 cases (which is true for a week) and cases which infection routes are unknown should be less than 5% of all new cases. (It was about 5%~10% when it was announced, and AFAIK it's now true.) There's still some anxiety because people started to become dull to the social distancing movement - so people are worrying that new cases might increase.
- modernyogihippy 7y ago
  What about international flights? Are airports in SK still closed? I'm pretty sure they will have to limit traffic into and out of the country despite easing social distancing. Otherwise, won't there be a new wave of infections when they let 'outsiders' back in from places where the virus is still running rampant?
  - pcr910303 7y ago
    > What about international flights? Are airports in SK still closed? I'm pretty sure they will have to limit traffic into and out of the country despite easing social distancing. Airports in South Korea has never been closed - South Korea has never banned anyone coming & going outside. A quarantine of two weeks became mandatory since April 1th, but South Korea has never closed Airports or has done a lockdown. > Otherwise, won't there be a new wave of infections when they let 'outsiders' back in from places where the virus is still running rampant? Definitely that's a concern, 5 out of 8 new cases yesterday were people that were infected from foreign countries. However since South Korea has never closed it's airports, people generally think it's controllable(like it always was).
- pcr910303 7y ago
tomxor 7y ago
> U.S. has swelled to more than 700,000 while Korea [...] have slowed to just over 10,000. Comparing absolutes is not very useful so I thought I'd double check this. The difference is obviously less when normalized but the US is still an order of magnitude worse than SK: USA: 700e3 / 328.2e6 * 100 = 0.213% SK: 10e3 / 51.64e6 * 100 = 0.019%
- lm28469 7y ago
  Looking at the graphs shows a whole other story though. South korea is on the way down for weeks now, the US are still on the way up. (active cases) https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
snambi 7y ago
How does testing prevent the disease? Also, if someone tests -ve, is that mean he/she is immune to the disease?
vanderburgt 7y ago
In this NPR podcast they expand on the methodology applied in S-Korea: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/18/837905422/the-coronavirus-guilt-trip https://www.npr.org/2020/04/18/837905422/the-coronavirus-gui...
aaron695 7y ago
> show mass testing success And public masks, good contact tracking, and they say gloves but hand PPE, like alcohol, also I assume a good isolation system that doesn't scare people but seen no reports on this. Investing on making testing to be cheap and quick has however been something people missed, compared to pie in the sky things like vaccines. Also compared to masks which are obvious but have been religiously attacked in the West.

194 points by Reedx 7y ago

neonate 7y ago

https://archive.md/0Kygf https://archive.md/0Kygf

Robotbeat 7y ago
This is an archive of the above article. Thank you!

makomk 7y ago

This worries me. South Korea's mass testing alone was not enough to contain the coronavirus outbreak; they relied on social distancing measures too: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-southkorea/south-korea-extends-intensive-social-distancing-to-reach-50-daily-coronavirus-cases-idUSKBN21M02P https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-southk...

ajross 7y ago
Yes, but once the outbreak is at a low enough level, and you have sufficient test bandwidth, you can manage it via testing and tracing. Everyone who gets sick, with anything, gets tested (in some variants of the plan every everywhere gets tested every N days). If you find a positive, quarantine them and test everyone they came in contact with. Repeat. This reduces the rate of spread by catching community transmission before the end of its cycle. And it's worked with other outbreaks in the past. But it depends on having a very large available pool of rapid testing, so you can't do it when you have thousands of cases per day. But a few dozen... probably. It definitely seems to be working in Korea. But again, it only works once the outbreak is well contained. Stay home.
- makomk 7y ago
  The trouble is, reducing the size of the outbreak doesn't affect the number of tests needed to do this much at all, and the number of people South Korea has been testing doesn't seem to have increased in quite a while. In fact, it seems to have actually decreased compared to back in March. Like, as far as I can tell, they're still using the same contact tracing and testing strategy that failed to contain it before without additional strong social distancing, and the social distancing is weakening.
- api 7y ago
  That is very labor intensive and isn't sustainable. People will get complacent fast.
  - jeremyjh 7y ago
    It is a lot more sustainable than the alternatives.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- usaar333 7y ago
  > But it depends on having a very large available pool of rapid testing Not necessarily. You can just aggressively quarantine - basically the strategy in China. > so you can't do it when you have thousands of cases per day At what scale? Iceland was able to do it with ~200 new cases per day per million. The majority of US states haven't had spikes this high - nowhere in CA has even come close to that. For some reason, we've only recently started building up the volunteer armies needed to do this (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-coronavirus-contact-tracing-case-15199505.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-coronav...) - this should have been done on day 1.
  - ajross 7y ago
    > Iceland was able to do it Iceland's per capita new infection rate peaked higher than basically any nation in the world, and while it's dropping comparatively rapidly it hasn't reached a stable baseline yet. I don't think this is a good example at all. While it's clear their lockdown "worked" (in the sense of recovering them from a disastrous peak), I think it's still very much an open question as to whether their testing capacity will sustain this success.
    - usaar333 7y ago
      case rate, not infection rate. They are one of the few nations in the world that are credibly even close to catching half their infections. The US is probably missing 90% (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.06.20055582v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.06.20055582v...) To that point, their death rate is lower than the Bay Area. To a second point, Iceland is under a very weak lockdown, if you can even call it that. Their elementary schools remain open.
      - cma 7y ago
        Through mass testing they already avoided one nursing home hit, and haven’t had a single hit. If they do, their fatality rate could quadruple because of how small the numbers are we are looking at there.
narrator 7y ago
South Korea: 234 deaths 8042 recovered. China: 4632 deaths, 77k recovered[1]. Their treatment protocol is an order of magnitude better than every other country. What are they doing that we're not? This is a huge glaring discrepancy. What's the difference between their treatment protocols and everyone else's? [1]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
- usaar333 7y ago
  https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china+population+%2F+south+korea+population https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china+population+%2F+s... Actually worse than China by that metric, though given credibility issues of Chinese data, let's just say about the same.
- rhino369 7y ago
  The "recovered" numbers in other countries aren't even close to accurate. Countries with large outbreaks are only testing people with severe symptoms. Korea is testing anyone who comes near someone with the virus. So are catching close to everyone who has it.
- yfzhou 7y ago
  Western countries most likely still aren't testing mild patients. SK and China went for full containment: every single positive case is hospitalized and close contacts are quarantined in hotels so few cases are missed. While in New York, hospitals are focused on saving critical patients. If you test positive but have mild symptoms, you are usually let home anyway so it doesn't really make sense to test most people who would be taken very seriously in Asia.
- varjag 7y ago
  > China: 4632 deaths, 77k recovered There are zero deaths and zero cases in Turkmenistan, must have gotten their treatment protocols tight.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  What's the difference between their treatment protocols and everyone else's? It's mind boggling anyone has to ask now this has been going on so long but here goes. 1) They had an approach plan beforehand because they had observed the previous SARS epidemic and took the danger seriously. 2) They had "quarantine hotels" freely available for those who were positive to prevent them from infecting others. (Seattle has a few of these, I've heard but they aren't widespread in the US. The idea of housing people freely is anethema to the US.) 3) They did testing early and often. 4) Their doctors and nurses worked with full PPEs, full anti-contamination suits, so they didn't themselves massively spread the illness. 5) They reserved hospitals specifically for the epidemic and had protocols for sending people to these hotel. 6) They had drive through testing and other testing easily and freely available (the US plan of profiting from testing is just so "I can't even"). 7) They did systematic contact tracing with an app for people to discover where infectious people had been. 8) They did social distancing with mask from the start. -- The US had literally done NONE of this. What the US has done is last-ditch efforts by states after the ostensibly responsible parties (the CDC etc) failed massively. And the Federal government is now literally sabotaging the states.

Benmcdonald__ 7y ago

3 new cases of coronavirus in Korea today 1 person has died this year from coronavirus in Seoul Looks to be near the end of the outbreak for Korea

coldcode 7y ago
The US will hit 40,000 deaths today.
- dpau 7y ago
  and 22 million unemployed
  - 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
    For businesses that will probably never return.
    - lmeyerov 7y ago
      They'll be replaced, but the owners, employees, and loved ones who die won't.
      - crimsonalucard 7y ago
        Why the hell is this voted down? It's true. There is a sacrifice that must be made between saving lives and saving businesses that is very real. Ideally we want to save lives but there will be a line drawn somewhere where we must open up businesses again.
        collyw 7y ago
        I have to agree on this. Just go to any country with a poorly functioning economic system, the healthcare matches it.
        7y ago

FlorianRappl 7y ago

South Korea demonstrated from the beginning on how to deal with this (despite their slow start - which still is super quick compared to most western countries). But its completely wrong to think they passed it. They also have massive impediments at the moment. Back to normal? Far from it.

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
But people are still working and their economy is still running. This is a HUGE improvement over what we have currently in the USA.
- throw_away 7y ago
  & just looking at the raw data, they seem to have a waaay better solution than we do: https://imgur.com/a/2T0GVoe https://imgur.com/a/2T0GVoe from http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ http://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/ if anyone wants to compare other stats.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    A significant part of the lower peak is the earlier intervention. There's similar patterns if you compare between US states.
  - usaar333 7y ago
    They had really good contact tracing. I'm not even sure how much we're attempting this in the US. "Lockdowns" without contact tracing is taking the path of "herd immunity for essential workers"
- killIdeas 7y ago
  The current narrative is that anyone who thinks this quarentine is poorly managed is a Trump supporter. This couldn't be further from the truth. They have made it political.
  - 7y ago

ldng 7y ago

On the other hand, they have something like 65 re-infected people. Could it be that they have a different/new strain ? Edit I don't see why the downvotes. It is easily fact-checkable. Those 65 persons were hospitalized for their symptoms, considered treated and released and about 2 weeks later showed symptoms again.

deleted 7y ago
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3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
We need to wait until we have antibody testing to get a clear picture about this. A theory is that these asymptomatic cases simply had latent virus in their nasal passages (thus testing positive), and not actually be building any antibodies from an infection.
- bb2018 7y ago
  Yeah - Id love to know if there are any cases where someone was sick enough that they were treated, recovered, and then got sick enough they need actual treatment again.
- jeremyjh 7y ago
  About half of the reinfected have symptoms.

narrator 7y ago

Yup

zamfi 7y ago
> Bill Gates has literally been preparing the last 20 years to make enormous amounts of money on a forced vaccination program Is this one of those conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing about? Bill Gates’ foundation has been giving away money for decades. If you think he’s planning to make a bunch of money off “forced vaccination”, you’re stuck in the past — Gates doesn’t care about making more money, he cares about getting the respect of his peer group & broader society. He’s not going to earn money off this, he’s going to earn respect. That has nothing to do with “forced” vaccination, and everything to do with (the perception of) saving lives otherwise lost to this virus. If he funds a real vaccine, whether forced or not, he’ll accomplish his goal. Please, leave the shortsighted “greed” conspiracy theories off this site.
- stevenwoo 7y ago
  I do not believe any conspiracy theory about Gates and vaccines or anything else. But his comment about voting for Trump if the other candidate raise his taxes too much doesn't support the non greed argument ( he reiterated it after saying he was kidding with a straw man argument). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMMZ1Qzr1ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMMZ1Qzr1ag
- bb2018 7y ago
  Perhaps it would indulge the conspiracy theories too much - but I'd kinda love to see an actual breakdown of how something like this could ever make him money. Think of the huge amount of money he has lost from this in the other businesses he owns and think of all the money he invested in this for decades he could have invested in other lucrative industries. How much would he need from this supposed plan to even breakeven? Thirty billion?
  - tedunangst 7y ago
    That's why it's called a conspiracy theory, not a consistency theory.

Aretas77 7y ago

Won't this reignite the spreading of the virus? Like, they missed a few people who were asymptotic and not tested, and are roaming the streets with other people?

microcolonel 7y ago
No, because they test people regularly and do accurate contact tracing. Thanks to a favourable regulatory environment and a profusion of capable people, South Korea scaled up testing and tracing capacity very rapidly. Furthermore, they were socially prepared to do the basic social distancing. Also, Taiwan has done an excellent job, and they didn't need to perform nearly as many tests. AFAIK there hasn't been a single additional confirmed case in Taiwan for the last three days.
- colmvp 7y ago
  Taiwan also has a lot of preventative measures, i.e. mandatory mask usage in mass transit systems, government issued masks and mask rationing system, automated temperature checks at various public spaces, mask usage in schools, plastic dividers at restaurants... on top of that they have a very sophisticated scalable method of tracking people who have the virus and ensuring that they are abiding by quarantine rules via tracing the location of their cell phone. In my city, people are still arguing whether or not people in the mass transit system should be wearing masks.
  - clairity 7y ago
    what are the arguments against wearing masks on transit? i’m no fan of masks, but wearing them on mass transit (of any kind) makes sense. lots of random people in a relatively small, enclosed, and cramped airspace elevates transmission risk materially (as opposed to wearing them outside, where it’s negligible).
Benmcdonald__ 7y ago
Won't change as Korea never had a lock down and people were always going to cafes/restaurants

teapourer 7y ago

To be clear, the Korean government officially still recommends social distancing. They are especially worried about the family picnics mentioned in the article, and have officially closed many public parks in response. To repeat: don't take this as a sign that Korea believes it has successfully managed the outbreak.

colmvp 7y ago
I'm actually slightly worried as Singapore seemed to have handled the crisis quite well with only 1000ish cases for the longest time, but have now had cases balloon from only around 1350 total cases two weeks ago to 6000 today. Certainly, a lot of it has to with migrant workers and their living situations, but it also underscores how even when you have things under control, the virus can spread rapidly when your guard is down.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Same thing is true for Japan. Everything seems fine for a while, and suddenly the numbers explode.
  - Chunklight 7y ago
    Mysteriously right after the Olympics were postponed.
    - tooltalk 7y ago
      Nobody believed Japan. Trump had to call Abe to consider postponement and Canada was the first country to announce they wouldn't send their athletics to the summer Olympics in Tokyo on March 22.
  - yongjik 7y ago
    Couldn't find a better page, but according to a past version of wikipedia table[1], as of Mar 31, Japan had tested 32,497 people. The US had tested 1,108,500; South Korea, 410,564. A lot of people were perplexed by Japan's lack of testing. Seems like Japan's strategy (whatever it was) didn't work out in the end. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:COVID-19_testing_by_country&oldid=948428786 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:COVID-19...

melling 7y ago

South Korea started testing very early: “South Korea's foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, speaking to the BBC last week, said the key lessons from her country are that it developed testing for the virus even before it had a significant number of cases. "In mid-January, our health authorities quickly conferred with the research institutions here [to develop a test]," Kang said. "And then they shared that result with the pharmaceutical companies, who then produced the reagent [chemical] and the equipment needed for the testing."

LordHumungous 7y ago

Does it show the success of their approach? Given that new cases hit the hospitals 2 weeks after exposure it seems like it is far too soon to know that. Also, over what timeline are we talking? South Korea has fewer deaths now, will that be the case in two years time? I've seen a lot of articles lately drawing conclusions from the state of the world as it exists now. But this is a highly dynamic situation. Today's assumptions are next month's fallacies. We need more humility.

dominotw 7y ago

how was south korea able to scale up their testing so fast. Where did the extra testing capacity come from. I've been really curious about this but haven't seen any good answers so far.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
All rich countries have been able to scale up their testing similarly quickly, once they decided it was a national priority to do so.
- dominotw 7y ago
  then how come all rich countries don't have 'mass testing success' like the article claims happened in south korea.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    They took a long time to decide it was a national priority. At the point when Korea started heavily ramping up its testing program, most Western countries took roughly the same approach they took during SARS, where they contact traced and tested only the few cases they knew about with the expectation that'd be enough.
    - dominotw 7y ago
      I am unable to find any reliable data that shows the ramp up of testing capacity after deciding its a national priority by country. What is the basis for 'similarly quickly' ? Sibling comment to your original comment seems to suggest US wasn't able to 'similarly quickly' due to lack of onsite manufacturing. Even the article suggests this, > The country was testing people for the virus at the fastest pace in the world
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        I can't find the data off the top of my head, but in the middle of March the US was able to ramp up from barely 1k tests a day to 100k within a week or two. It's my understanding that Germany went comparably fast.

BurningFrog 7y ago

Meanwhile, the US still has very little testing capacity, with no signs of if and when that will change. One problem with the death of journalism is that no one is even reporting on this.

deleted 7y ago
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SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
Lots of people are reporting on this - I'm not sure where you're looking that you're missing it.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  It's entirely possible I have missed something, and I'd love some links! I'm especially looking for reporting on why it's so slow, what the bottlenecks are, and who's responsible. Even if there is some good reporting out there, I think this should me one of the main news items in a healthy society. I have seen reporting on the bungling of the initial testing rollout, like this one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/contamination-at-cdc-lab-delayed-rollout-of-coronavirus-tests/2020/04/18/fd7d3824-7139-11ea-aa80-c2470c6b2034_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/contamination-...
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    This article for example was on the CNN front page, explaining that the major bottlenecks are test swabs and the required reagents and describing a specific FDA action which the governor of Ohio thinks would solve his problems. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/...
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      Thanks! That is better than I've seen. I'm still missing anything beyond summarizing what officials have said. The Ohio Governor blaming FDA regulations is the closest to an analysis in there.

pcr910303 7y ago

Very surprised to find out country (city) in HN's top page! For people who are interested in current Korea's situation: There were 18 new cases two days ago, and 8 new cases yesterday. The number of new cases have been consistently falling since April 14th. 'Intense social distancing' was stopped yesterday (April 19th), and the Korean government is planning to drop the 'social distancing' policy on May 5th. Schools are planned to open on May 6th, and the ban of churches, bars, etc. are expected to be dropped in the following days (probably tomorrow). The KCDC is saying that to drop the 'social distancing', there should consistently have less than 30 cases (which is true for a week) and cases which infection routes are unknown should be less than 5% of all new cases. (It was about 5%~10% when it was announced, and AFAIK it's now true.) There's still some anxiety because people started to become dull to the social distancing movement - so people are worrying that new cases might increase.

modernyogihippy 7y ago
What about international flights? Are airports in SK still closed? I'm pretty sure they will have to limit traffic into and out of the country despite easing social distancing. Otherwise, won't there be a new wave of infections when they let 'outsiders' back in from places where the virus is still running rampant?
- pcr910303 7y ago
  > What about international flights? Are airports in SK still closed? I'm pretty sure they will have to limit traffic into and out of the country despite easing social distancing. Airports in South Korea has never been closed - South Korea has never banned anyone coming & going outside. A quarantine of two weeks became mandatory since April 1th, but South Korea has never closed Airports or has done a lockdown. > Otherwise, won't there be a new wave of infections when they let 'outsiders' back in from places where the virus is still running rampant? Definitely that's a concern, 5 out of 8 new cases yesterday were people that were infected from foreign countries. However since South Korea has never closed it's airports, people generally think it's controllable(like it always was).
pcr910303 7y ago

tomxor 7y ago

> U.S. has swelled to more than 700,000 while Korea [...] have slowed to just over 10,000. Comparing absolutes is not very useful so I thought I'd double check this. The difference is obviously less when normalized but the US is still an order of magnitude worse than SK: USA: 700e3 / 328.2e6 * 100 = 0.213% SK: 10e3 / 51.64e6 * 100 = 0.019%

lm28469 7y ago
Looking at the graphs shows a whole other story though. South korea is on the way down for weeks now, the US are still on the way up. (active cases) https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore... https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

snambi 7y ago

How does testing prevent the disease? Also, if someone tests -ve, is that mean he/she is immune to the disease?

vanderburgt 7y ago

In this NPR podcast they expand on the methodology applied in S-Korea: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/18/837905422/the-coronavirus-guilt-trip https://www.npr.org/2020/04/18/837905422/the-coronavirus-gui...

aaron695 7y ago

> show mass testing success And public masks, good contact tracking, and they say gloves but hand PPE, like alcohol, also I assume a good isolation system that doesn't scare people but seen no reports on this. Investing on making testing to be cheap and quick has however been something people missed, compared to pie in the sky things like vaccines. Also compared to masks which are obvious but have been religiously attacked in the West.