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To be clear, the Korean government officially still recommends social distancing. They are especially worried about the family picnics mentioned in the article,

• colmvp 6y 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 6y ago
    Same thing is true for Japan. Everything seems fine for a while, and suddenly the numbers explode.
    • Chunklight 6y ago
      Mysteriously right after the Olympics were postponed.
      • tooltalk 6y 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 6y 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...
      • seunosewa 6y ago
        Under testing always fails. You can’t defeat an invisible enemy.
    • seunosewa 6y ago
      The calm before the storm happens in countries that are not testing people adequately. The numbers seem to explode when they really start testing. South Korea is still testing aggressively. Recently they even started re-testing recovered patients. Those who tested positive had their contacts traced and tested too. As long as they remain vigilant, they will not see another big explosion. They seem to have the right attitude. I’m waiting to see if there will be a little outbreak as a result of the elections they held recently.
  • op03 6y ago
    It will be fine as long as the medical system is prepped to handle surge/moving overflow smoothly/pulling in and sharing resources etc. Remember most positives won't require hospitalization (~50% wont even show any symptoms, 40% will have mild symptoms). And compared to few months back readiness/awareness levels at hospitals is much higher.
    • ImaCake 6y ago
      > ~50% wont even show any symptoms It is closer to 20% A lot of articles stating more are mis-interpreting those numbers from prospective studies. It is possible that the authors of such studies would downplay false positives as well.
      • mattmanser 6y ago
        I think they don't know yet, even the US were saying it might be 25-50% a couple of days ago. For example the testing of the aircraft carrier, one of the few cases of total population testing, showed 60% asymptomatic cases but had a young population, and it's not clear from the information we've heard publically if some of those will develop symptoms later. So at the moment no-one really knows for certain.
        • Lewton 6y ago
          60% asymptomatic at the time of testing Most of them will eventually begin showing symptoms
      • TrainedMonkey 6y ago
        50% keeps recurring because multiple mass testing efforts found that half of tested people were asymptomatic. However, that is mostly a function of a long incubation period. A significant portion of the infected developed symptoms later.
    • Lewton 6y ago
      Iceland did random sampling and while it showed 50% asymptomatic at the time of testing, only 15% ended up not showing symptoms at all
  • noobermin 6y ago
    Tbh, SG should have never let people come particularly from countries with covid outbreaks during March. While spreading across the dorms is a big part of the internal spreading, it's clear the outbreak that started in March were clusters involving people coming to sg from abroad. Almost everyone shut down travel from China (particularly Wuhan) but no one shut down travel from Europe during March. Biggest mistake ever. I don't know enough if it was tourists or whether it was returning Singaporeans but they should have instructed them to remain where they were for the sake of the country.
    • teruakohatu 6y ago
      > but no one shut down travel from Europe during March. Biggest mistake ever The USA did shut their border to a lot of Europe in early March. But at the time the WHO opposed border closure.
      • RobAtticus 6y ago
        Kind of - it closed the borders for Europeans traveling to the US, but did little to manage Americans returning from abroad. Given March is winter in the US (thus less tourism), I would imagine the majority of Europe -> US traffic at the time is Americans returning home, that's a rather weak closure.
        • SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
          What countries refused re-entry to their own citizens?
        • hadtodoit 6y ago
          I think you are diminishing the amount of traffic between Europe and US on any given day. Closing the borders to Europe may very well have saved us from catastrophe. Numbers exploded everywhere in March.
        • lurquer 6y ago
          >I would imagine the majority of Europe -> US traffic at the time is Americans returning home, that's a rather weak closure. Over 10 million a year from Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and UK alone. Just tourist visas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_the_United_States#Visitor_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_the_United_States#V...
  • lokedhs 6y ago
    Almost all new cases are from clusters in dormitories for migrant workers. They live very close together in those locations, and things will spread very fast. Numbers outside these locations are going down because of the recent "circuit breaker" they introduced a few weeks ago.
• Nokinside 6y ago
  You can't top mitigation/supression until there is herd immunity. You can get the immunity only two ways 1) enough people have been gone trough the disease or 2) vaccination. South Korea must use mitigation/supression until they have enough people vaccinated or it flares up again. Complete eradication without immunity is not feasible unless you isolate whole country from the rest of the world permanently.
  • daveFNbuck 6y ago
    You don't have to completely isolate the country from the world. You just have to do testing and quarantining to ensure that infectious people and things aren't entering the country.
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      You can still trade with the rest of the world - people are still doing that now, in fact, with international trade being universally exempted from travel bans. But I can't imagine tourism or business travel being compatible with the level of quarantine required to keep an endemic respiratory virus eradicated within your borders.
    • Nokinside 6y ago
      That's true but it's very hard to keep the system 100% tight. Governments can't prevent human trade or drug trade either. Just something like 1 infected entering per day or week means that you must keep up suppressing and tracing.
      • PeterisP 6y ago
        Sure, but keeping up testing, contact tracing and other South Korea-style suppression measures is no big deal compared to the severe restrictions most other countries have had to implement. It's very troubling to shut down the economy for a whole year, but it's certainly plausible to sustain those measures until a vaccine is ready.
    • yfzhou 6y ago
• WillPostForFood 6y ago
  The article and discussions about Korea seem to mainly revolve around testing and contact tracing. These are complex and expensive, and substantially more difficult to manage in a country like the US which is 7x the population, and is somewhat decentralized (50 states). Meanwhile, the on the street observations in the article are: masks, masks, masks. Masks are cheap and easy. So let's start with masks, masks, masks first while we figure out and ramp up testing and contact tracing. the first Apple store to reopen outside China had lines snaking out the door as many South Koreans -- almost all wearing masks At Han River park in Seoul’s Banpo district, families -- also in masks -- were having picnics including requiring voters to wear masks and disposable plastic gloves while casting their ballots People are still wearing masks and mind talking face-to-face with strangers
  • James_Henry 6y ago
    Also, they are very meticulous about taking their shoes off before going into a home and about keeping their floors clean. Which may be more important, especially in dense locations, than we might be realizing. A Chinese study found that the virus was probably being moved around by people's shoes https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0885_article https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0885_article
    • BubRoss 6y ago
      That says they detected it on floors in hospitals. Does it talk about it being on shoes, entering homes and ultimately infecting people?
      • James_Henry 6y ago
        No, there's evidence of it on half of the soles of ICU workers' shoes, and they found the virus on the floor of areas where patients were not found. From this they proposed that within the hospital, shoes could be a vector and highly recommend that people disinfect shoe souls before walking out of wards with Covid-19 patients. There are not any reported cases of the virus infecting anyone by shoe though.
    • 6y ago
• joe_the_user 6y ago
  To repeat: don't take this as a sign that Korea believes it has successfully managed the outbreak. South Korea has had fewer deaths than other nations, South Korea has a semi-open economy now. What better model for managing the outbreak is there? (The condition of Europe and the US look very dismal) It's kind of strange seeing this claim with no substantiation beside "repeat" apparently staying on the top of HN for a while. South Korea hasn't entirely averted the danger and is clearly still keeping it in mind. The virus is going to be around for a while and normalizing life is needed and it seems South Korea has to the testing and contact tracing infrastructure needed for this. What is the counter-argument?
  • randomsearch 6y ago
    I think it’s too early to judge success. Most countries haven’t even been through one wave yet. We’re going to have to live with this for years.
    • joe_the_user 6y ago
      "I think it’s too early to judge success." Uh really? South Korea suppressed an epidemic and strengthened the tools they had for suppressing epidemics, maintaining economic strength and social cohesion. How are they not best position in the stage of managing the epidemic (the appropriate term used by the ggp). Oh, I know one really bad answer people are ready with - they didn't let the virus burn through their population to acquire herd immunity. The degree to which any other approach is going to leave a society ready to deal with new waves of this seems really, really low. Certainly, current US events aren't preparing for any future crisis.
      • randomsearch 6y ago
        Well, for one thing, people were saying the same about Singapore, but the number of cases there has grown exponentially. A pandemic isn't over in a few months, we have to look at it over years. For example: behavioural scientists tell us that people will only stand one major lockdown; using that lockdown early to keep deaths to a minimum initially may not be the best strategy. So thinking about the long-term is essential. Not saying you're wrong that South Korea has a good track record to this point. I am saying you're wrong to extrapolate that out to the likely arrival of a vaccine programme in 2021.
• hinkley 6y ago
  Do we know yet whether the clusters of fatalities among families are due to higher exposure rates or some genotypic susceptibility to the worst effects of the illness? Or is that just that the family clusters are good news copy (ugh) and over-represented?
  • brewdad 6y ago
    Spouses wouldn't necessarily share any genetic susceptibility yet there are plenty of stories of husband and wife pairs dying. Whether these stories are over-represented, like most areas of "proof", is pretty much impossible to say for certain at this point.
• nikofeyn 6y ago
  > To repeat: don't take this as a sign that Korea believes it has successfully managed the outbreak. but they have successfully managed it. it's just that they're still managing it and are not done.