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A few months ago there was a great write up called The Hammer And the Dance. The idea was to first "Hammer" down there numbers to something controllable with a

A few months ago there was a great write up called The Hammer And the Dance. The idea was to first "Hammer" down there numbers to something controllable with a tight lockdown and then use contact tracing and targeted quarantine to mostly keep it at the lower level. Countries like Spain, China and Italy nailed the hammer part, but are struggling with the dance. South Korea seems to have danced their way through the entire thing by never getting it escalate in the first place. The US tried to do a hammer and failed. The numbers didn't really go down for the city as a whole. We never had a coordinated decision to transition to the dance either and don't have anything in place to be successful at that step. Tests taking over a week and high case numbers to begin with make contact tracing and targeted quarantine in outbreak areas impossible

makomk 6y ago
South Korea seems to be stuck in an endless cycle of loosening restrictions, watching cases go up, and then having to tighten them up again and close businesses. It's not clear that it's even possible to use contact tracing to stop Covid-19 spreading (the evidence is very thin and dubious), but I'm not convinced they've got widespread enough testing to make it work if it is feasible - they don't seem to have expanded testing since about March, they've been doing a tenth of many tests a day in per-capita terms as the US, US, and the big EU states lately, and the way they seem to be managing this is by not routinely testing people with mild potential symptoms like other countries have been. Which means they have very limited ability to detect infections not linked to cases they know about, and contact tracing does nothing to stop those unknown, undetected infections from spreading. It just so happens the proportion of cases with no known ties to existing cases has been going up there lately. This is, of course, not the impression you'd get from news coverage in the UK or US, which is still generally spinning South Korea as a test and trace success story that demonstrates how badly our governments have failed. Hilariously, the Guardian even turned the fact that they were doing less Covid-19 testing than the UK into a positive the other day, describing them as a demonstration of how important targeted testing was.
siruncledrew 6y ago
US pounded the hammer right into its thumb at the start, and 9 months later are using small taps to try to pound the numbers down. The Dance is still a distant hope.

makomk 6y ago

South Korea seems to be stuck in an endless cycle of loosening restrictions, watching cases go up, and then having to tighten them up again and close businesses. It's not clear that it's even possible to use contact tracing to stop Covid-19 spreading (the evidence is very thin and dubious), but I'm not convinced they've got widespread enough testing to make it work if it is feasible - they don't seem to have expanded testing since about March, they've been doing a tenth of many tests a day in per-capita terms as the US, US, and the big EU states lately, and the way they seem to be managing this is by not routinely testing people with mild potential symptoms like other countries have been. Which means they have very limited ability to detect infections not linked to cases they know about, and contact tracing does nothing to stop those unknown, undetected infections from spreading. It just so happens the proportion of cases with no known ties to existing cases has been going up there lately. This is, of course, not the impression you'd get from news coverage in the UK or US, which is still generally spinning South Korea as a test and trace success story that demonstrates how badly our governments have failed. Hilariously, the Guardian even turned the fact that they were doing less Covid-19 testing than the UK into a positive the other day, describing them as a demonstration of how important targeted testing was.

siruncledrew 6y ago

US pounded the hammer right into its thumb at the start, and 9 months later are using small taps to try to pound the numbers down. The Dance is still a distant hope.