Coronavirus Cases Have Dropped Sharply In South Korea. What's Its Secret? (sciencemag.org) 148
South Korea "has emerged as a sign of hope and a model to emulate," reported Nature earlier on Tuesday. "The country of 50 million appears to have greatly slowed its epidemic; it reported only 74 new cases today, down from 909 at its peak on 29 February."
And it has done so without locking down entire cities or taking some of the other authoritarian measures that helped China bring its epidemic under control. "South Korea is a democratic republic, we feel a lockdown is not a reasonable choice," says Kim Woo-Joo, an infectious disease specialist at Korea University. South Korea's success may hold lessons for other countries — and also a warning: Even after driving case numbers down, the country is braced for a resurgence.
Behind its success so far has been the most expansive and well-organized testing program in the world, combined with extensive efforts to isolate infected people and trace and quarantine their contacts. South Korea has tested more than 270,000 people, which amounts to more than 5200 tests per million inhabitants — more than any other country except tiny Bahrain, according to the Worldometer website. The United States has so far carried out 74 tests per 1 million inhabitants, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show. South Korea's experience shows that "diagnostic capacity at scale is key to epidemic control," says Raina MacIntyre, an emerging infectious disease scholar at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. "Contact tracing is also very influential in epidemic control, as is case isolation," she says...
Legislation enacted since [2015] gave the government authority to collect mobile phone, credit card, and other data from those who test positive to reconstruct their recent whereabouts. That information, stripped of personal identifiers, is shared on social media apps that allow others to determine whether they may have crossed paths with an infected person... There are 43 drive-through testing stations nationwide, a concept now copied in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In the first week of March, the Ministry of the Interior also rolled out a smartphone app that can track the quarantined and collect data on symptoms.
"We hope our experience will help other countries control this COVID-19 outbreak," Kim tells Nature. And Reuters reports that in the five days since the article was published, South Korea has still kept new infections around a low 100 or less each day -- for 12 consecutive days -- compared with the peak of 909 new cases reported on February 29.
Reuters adds that though South Korea has experienced 8,961 cases, on Monday it reported its lowest daily number yet for new cases -- 64. And on the same day, "257 patients were released from hospitals where they had been isolated for treatment, the KCDC said.
"South Korea posted more recoveries than new infections on March 13 for the first time since its first case was confirmed on January 20."
Behind its success so far has been the most expansive and well-organized testing program in the world, combined with extensive efforts to isolate infected people and trace and quarantine their contacts. South Korea has tested more than 270,000 people, which amounts to more than 5200 tests per million inhabitants — more than any other country except tiny Bahrain, according to the Worldometer website. The United States has so far carried out 74 tests per 1 million inhabitants, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show. South Korea's experience shows that "diagnostic capacity at scale is key to epidemic control," says Raina MacIntyre, an emerging infectious disease scholar at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. "Contact tracing is also very influential in epidemic control, as is case isolation," she says...
Legislation enacted since [2015] gave the government authority to collect mobile phone, credit card, and other data from those who test positive to reconstruct their recent whereabouts. That information, stripped of personal identifiers, is shared on social media apps that allow others to determine whether they may have crossed paths with an infected person... There are 43 drive-through testing stations nationwide, a concept now copied in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In the first week of March, the Ministry of the Interior also rolled out a smartphone app that can track the quarantined and collect data on symptoms.
"We hope our experience will help other countries control this COVID-19 outbreak," Kim tells Nature. And Reuters reports that in the five days since the article was published, South Korea has still kept new infections around a low 100 or less each day -- for 12 consecutive days -- compared with the peak of 909 new cases reported on February 29.
Reuters adds that though South Korea has experienced 8,961 cases, on Monday it reported its lowest daily number yet for new cases -- 64. And on the same day, "257 patients were released from hospitals where they had been isolated for treatment, the KCDC said.
"South Korea posted more recoveries than new infections on March 13 for the first time since its first case was confirmed on January 20."
Early and decisive action by competent leadership. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a emerging as a test of voters. In certain countries like New Zealand, the voters have gone for competent leadership which is actually able to understand things like maths and exponential growth. In other countries, the choices have been based on different criteria and the people installed have been chosen for anti-science reasons such as not believing in global warming. These people are not equipped to read evidence and understand something that's coming but that they can't see in front of their eyes now. Many of these voters are going to end up with serious health problems or even dead simply because they voted in incompetents.
The Chinese and Russian cases show that the leadership didn't even have to be very competent, just basically so. The Chinese definitely made mistakes early on but then corrected quickly when they saw it wasn't working. Given that they could get away with that and then published their experience in medical journals there's almost no excuse for problems elsewhere where there was much more warning.
Re:Early and decisive action by competent leadersh (Score:5, Interesting)
Specifically, aggressive testing and contact tracing, along with transparency and open communication. For every new case, they would send out a text to people in the area saying, "This person ate at McDonald's on Tuesday afternoon," and urged people to show up for testing. They got on the ball early, and stayed vigilant.
Another thing I'll add, just as a cultural note... In a lot of Asian countries, surgical masks are available in every 7-11 and Circle-K, because they are a commonly used item, and there is no social stigma for wearing them. The main reason for this is that a large portion of the population still use scooters for commuting, and although many of these countries have made great strides in combating pollution, when you're on a scooter in heavy traffic you're going to experience a lot of fumes. So it's very common to see people wearing masks in this situation.
Thus, when the news breaks that there's a new virus on the loose, there's no frantic scramble to clear the shelves of masks, because everybody's got some in their sock drawer. I was in Taipei during the SARS outbreak, and within a day or two when I showed up at work there was a 100-pack of masks waiting for me on my desk. Everybody got them, and everybody wore them. It makes a huge difference.
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Specifically, aggressive testing and contact tracing, along with transparency and open communication.
THIS
My biggest complaint about the government of my home country (don't live there anymore, but have lots of family and friends I'm very worried about): Communication, on a scale of 1 to 10 ? 2, if I'm positive.
The whole chaos on the stock market? Half caused by uncertainty and not telling the truth. By saying on Wednesday that there won't be any measures of type X and on Saturday announcing that there will be. By not telling people what the next steps will be.
Leadership wasn't competent by accident (Score:5, Informative)
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Also in Hong Kong and Japan you're legally required to wear a mask in public if you believe you may have the 'flu.
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You put it in a very strongly policitized way, but I'm afraid it isn't a case of "right bad, left good": in Europe, the doctrine of Open Borders meant that any attempt at closing borders is immediately seen as an attack of that Most Holiest of Institutes, the EU. Thus, borders were kept open until it became untenable, and now the virus is everywhere.
Yet even under these circumstances, Italy is a special case. It has a large (300,000) Chinese community around Milan, with direct flights from Milan to Wuhan. T
Re:Early and decisive action by competent leadersh (Score:5, Informative)
Yet even under these circumstances, Italy is a special case. It has a large (300,000) Chinese community around Milan, with direct flights from Milan to Wuhan. These flights were kept running, and Chinese people returning to Italy were left un-screened, until it was far too late, because doing otherwise could potentially be seen as "racist". Yes, testing people for a deadly disease is now racist, if those people happen to come from a single nation! If that isn't peak leftist idiocy I don't know what is.
I know what peak idiocy is, repeating memes you got from Ahuxley... Italy stopped flights from China before America did [forbes.com]
Italy imposed a ban on flights from China on 31 January, immediately after a Chinese couple in Rome tested positive for the virus. The U.S. began to restrict flights from China four days later. But while Italy enacted a full ban, the U.S. policy was only a restriction, with wide exemptions.
It was already too late by then. And all the travel from other European countries would have spread it anyway. But try and stick to the facts.
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Yet even under these circumstances, Italy is a special case. It has a large (300,000) Chinese community around Milan, with direct flights from Milan to Wuhan. These flights were kept running, and Chinese people returning to Italy were left un-screened, until it was far too late, because doing otherwise could potentially be seen as "racist". Yes, testing people for a deadly disease is now racist, if those people happen to come from a single nation! If that isn't peak leftist idiocy I don't know what is.
I know what peak idiocy is, repeating memes you got from Ahuxley... Italy stopped flights from China before America did [forbes.com]
The GP didn't claim that Italy only started screening after the US started screening, he said:
Chinese people returning to Italy were left un-screened, until it was far too late,
He is correct - there was a refusal to test Chinese arrivals due to the perception of racism.
It was already too late by then. And all the travel from other European countries would have spread it anyway. But try and stick to the facts.
In other words, the unrestricted borders contributed to Italy's problems. If they weren't so scared of appearing racist the EU would have started screening at major borders and completely closed off smaller entrances.
The unrestricted wet market created the problem, the resistance to isolation allowed it to spread.
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He is correct - there was a refusal to test Chinese arrivals due to the perception of racism.
Look I know you want to ascribe everything to specious claims of racism. I think someone called out some racist shit you said once and instead of actually thinking about it you're not trying to devalue all claims by making up shit like that.
Saying something racist doesn't make you a bad person per-se. It depends on how you deal with it after that's most important.
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Re:Early and decisive action by competent leadersh (Score:5, Informative)
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You do know that the regulations of the Schengen Area (not the EU) allow for border controls between countries whenever necessary? Some of these controls even predated the corona outbreak. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Early and decisive action by competent leadersh (Score:4, Informative)
Thus, borders were kept open until it became untenable, and now the virus is everywhere.
National borders. National borders don't mean squat to a virus. Geographic borders have some meaning, and sometimes those coincide with national borders, but the way in which you're framing this is very much in terms of nationalism and not in terms of functionality. This is especially true in the EU, where they don't have border controls between countries within the Schengen Area, and so setting up quarantine areas along national borders would just as much work and be less effective than setting up quarantine areas around regions of infection.
You might have the best of intentions here, but it's not hard to see why someone would interpret this as racist.
Re:Early and decisive action by competent leadersh (Score:5, Informative)
You put it in a very strongly policitized way, but I'm afraid it isn't a case of "right bad, left good":
In fact, it doesn't relate to that at all, and some of the most conservative, right-wing countries have acted quickly and decisively while some of the left-wing governed countries dragged their feet.
This is competence and understanding of very basic truths about epidemics and exponential growth.
There are smart and stupid people in every part of the political spectrum.
Re:Early and decisive action by competent leadersh (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is how far you stretch statistical truths to make individual predictions. Americans of African-American hertiage has on average a lower socioeconomic status. Truth. People with lower socioeconomic status are more likely to commit crime. Truth. We have two suspects, a black and a white kid. Is making a prediction truth? Prejudice? Racist as fuck? Particularly if there's a really low prevalence, but the suspicion is very targeted like "flying while Arab" after 9/11. Do you give all of them the rubber glove treatment while waving everyone else through?
I'm sorry for the women who go around afraid of getting raped. But it's also kinda sad to be treated as a possible rapist simply because I got a dick. When there's sexual harassment classes that clearly speak to half the room saying "this is because you can't keep it in your pants" and to the other half "this is how you report them". When there's people afraid of single dads, male babysitters, teachers and coaches because by comparison there's very few female child molesters. It's a bit like being born into a caste system, this is what "your kind" is and you're branded for life.
There's still quite a few people in the EU that remember when they used to shoot at each other with lead bullets. While we hopefully won't return to that the EU is working hard to try making everyone solve their problems together without going back into the trenches with finger pointing and blaming each other. So I'm sorry we didn't jump from "a few Chinese has a virus" to "ban all the Chinese, send them home". It's not like Trump and his xenophobia has done any better at stopping it from spreading around the US, it came from China too not via the EU.
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You put it in a very strongly policitized way, but I'm afraid it isn't a case of "right bad, left good"
I thought about that carefully and tried to avoid it. I would consider the ("right wing") leadership of Germany reasonably competent. I would consider the ("left wing") leadership of Venesuela as complete clowns and I'm a bit mixed on Canada. Although there's truth that I think Boris and Trump are complete clowns and that is related to their alt-right leanings, I don't have the same competence feelings about a number of the corporate-intertwined right wingers. I'd consider them competent but sometimes e
Re:Early and decisive action by competent leadersh (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Leadership is pointless without a plan. Let's not have any doubts, Korea deployed something which they have mostly planned if they get hit by a bioweapon fro the North.
2. Competent use of technology.
2.1. Korea did not take no for an answer when the mobile operators moaned about not having enough capacity to track every phone.
2.2. Pervasive tracking and data harvesting of mobile phone trajectories - this is now in use also in Israel, coming online in Germany and in use in some areas of Russia coming online nationally including an SMS notification system that "you have been in contact, please isolate yourself and get tested on dates X, Y and Z".
2.3. Unified use of data - data from border control in all of the mentioned in 2.2 is uploaded to Health, combined with passport database data and loaded into whatever local authorities have - face recog on public transport if available, Oyster like public transport payment systems, etc.
From this perspective, the Russians have rolled all sixes - they have a computer nerd as a prime minister who knows and understand the role of data. So little surprise that they have 52000 people under observation (as of this morning) and under 300 cases. Similarly - it shows where they have working "digital systems" (large cities who did the European Cup) and the middle of nowhere. In large cities, nearly all cases are put a lid on straight away. Out in the sticks... not so much.
Similarly, Eastern Europe is doing quite well on the overall. They all dusted off the old folder which says: "Plan in case of NATO biological attack" and are applying it. Bulgaria plan 40 years ago specified that the head of the army medics coordinates the response. Guess who is coordinating it now (prime minister is in the backseat and mostly keeps his trap shut).
We unfortunately have idiots instead. Some are outright idiots like the leader of the Italian Democratic party who went to party with students in Milan in the beginning of the pandemic to demonstrate that life goes on. Down with coronavirus at the moment as a result. And let's not talk about Bo Jo, the last thing we need is effortless superiority made by the classicism department.
One thing for sure, is that a lot of things will never be the same again. If anyone thinks that the Italians will forget and forgive the fact that the Russian Vodka Burners are flying across half of the world down to Sochi first and then West to deliver aid because the Polish Kazynsky c*nt has not given them overflight permission. If anyone thinks that the Italians will forgive and forget that the same equipment which the Russians and Chinese have shipped down there now has remained idle at USA bases while the "designated human shields" (sorry allied citizens) die like flies. And so on...
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Korea deployed something which they have mostly planned if they get hit by a bioweapon fro the North.
Let's not go full retard. Korea, as well as Japan, which response is equally successful, deployed something which they developed during the SARS epidemic a decade ago - experience and preparation.
Europe and the US botched the response because they gave in to business requests to keep things as usual so that they not upset the short-term profits.
The "we're so superior, it won't hit us as bad" mentality at its worst.
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Though, when the dust has settled we will probably find out that it was not because of SARS, but because of being prepared for Fat Kim The Third using a biological weapon.
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Korea had another big advantage, the biggest outbreak was in some megachurch who ignored government advice on what to do, with ensuing mass infection of churchgoers, so corralling the biggest group of the infected was made a lot easier.
Note if reading about this that it's election season over there right now and people are making political capital of it, so take things with a grain of salt.
In general as others have pointed out there's no secret, they had a plan prepared for what to do and executed it with
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Do you really think the US doesn't have a bio weapon defense plan left over from the cold war, if not from the war on terror?
Even if there weren't or it wasn't usable for some reason, the health services must have a pandemic plan. It's their job to plan for it when there isn't an active pandemic going on (which is most of the time).
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Errrr...the economy and society are a lot more complicated now than during the Cold War. I doubt any plans, even if they do exist, would be applicable. Also, an inept administration is incapable of following any plan. They are merely a bunch of shoot from the hip cowboys hoping to hit the target while screwing the hobgoblins of their neuroses, i.e., the "media", Democrats, scientists, academics, foreigners, would be immigrants, etc.
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Errrr...the economy and society are a lot more complicated now than during the Cold War. I doubt any plans, even if they do exist, would be applicable.
Well the OP was saying Eastern Europe was using the plans from the Warsaw pact days too. I, of course, have no idea what kind of top secret plans are available, but I'd expect that this is something that is kept up to date by any half-competent country (lol).
Not that it matters if there's nobody who can actually execute on the plan, as you say.
*Early* is the key. (Score:2)
After the tsunami of Puket, research was done. They tested doing nothing, taking your time to choose the best possible action before doing it, doing the best possible action right awayy and doing just "something" right away.
And it turns out that doing just "something" (and hopefully but not necessarily improving on that on the fly) was 80% as effective as doing the best possible action right away. (Which you may not know right away).
The reason is, that even a bad (early) move in a direction is still a move
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You cannot take such an early and small data
Re:Easy answer. (Score:5, Informative)
You know, before China locked down all of Hubei on 23rd Jan, they were on the same ~25% growth, quadruple-every-week curve that a lot of Western nations are now. That curve started flattening out around 3rd Feb (in line with the 8-10 day case lead), showing that the lockout was really helping. But if it hadn't - if you assume they're lying about controlling their cases - then it's easy enough to calculate what the situation should look like there today.
Assuming the reported ~20,000 cases on 3rd Feb, in the 7 weeks since, their cases would've skyrocketed by 4^7 or 16,384 times, to 327 million infections, and adding an astonishing 46 million more every day (though case growth might've peaked naturally in the near future). If their reported 2.3% death rate continued then they'd have close to 7.5 million dead by now, maybe 100,000 dying every day - quite probably a lot more, given that kind of massive overload of their healthcare system.
That sort of scenario would be pretty hard to sweep under the rug, don't you think?
What do you think of these stories? (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know the answer. However, what do you think of these stories?
Russia and China have no more Coronavirus cases? Are they lying?
Why does Russia, population 146 million, have fewer coronavirus cases than Luxembourg? [cnn.com]
"On social media, Russians have raised questions referring to their country's poor track record of transparency..."
China Continues To Lie? China Says No New Coronavirus Cases Nationwid [thailandmedical.news]
Re:What do you think of these stories? (Score:4, Informative)
Russia is reporting a large and mysterious (haha) uptick in pneumonia cases. Definitely not caused by coronavirus though. https://www.reuters.com/articl... [reuters.com]
Re:Easy answer. (Score:5, Interesting)
They just stopped testing.
That is our specialty. Not Chinese, not Korean, not Russian.
They are lucky though - all of them MAKE THEIR OWN TESTS. Even if they are less sensitive, they are still tests - f.e. it looks like the Russians are still using polymerase from a different species of Thermophylus, same as 28 years ago which has lower end-to-end amplification so cannot pick up extreme dilutions.
They also publish their test numbers and if they cheated on them or did something funky with the data (*) we would know by now from whistleblowers or opposition press where there is one.
In any case, it is actually easy to deduce who is doing what from the evolutionary tree graph: https://nextstrain.org/ncov [nextstrain.org]
If you do not know how to read it (what are you doing on Slashdot then?) here are some explanations of the most obvious points:https://www.fagain.co.uk/node/60
For the time being the tally is as follows:
1. China - numbers did not originally include 43 thousand asymptomatic suspected cases. Source - China Morning Post, yesterday. No other data polishing is known to date.
2. Korea - no known numbers massage to date - they are testing > 25K per day, the numbers of people under isolation, methods of location, methods of contact tracing, etc are known.
3. Russia - same as Korea. All numbers are on the rospotrebnadzor website. They have had 130K people in mandatory quarantine in total, 72K at present. 496 cases as of today. Methods for tracing are same as Korean and Chinese - mobile, passport control, use of electronic payment and face recog. They are making the mobile tracing official from this week with SMS notifications if you should go and get tested or isolate yourself.
4. Israel - same as Korea, but not public about it, number of observed/quarantined unclear.
5. Germany - starting to use the same as Korea, changes to constitution and privacy law in the parliament for this to be allowed. All numbers published including test numbers.
6. Bulgaria - requested from operators the same things as Korea, did they get it - unknown. Known Massage cases:
7. USA - as USA networks do not have the backend capacity to do what Korea did, Trump is negotiating the same from Facebook and Google. Numbers highly dubious and "massaged"
8. Netherlands. There is absolutely no way in hell a country which got its patient zero as early as days after the initial event in Wuhan (December 2019) and supplied nearly all of Europe with infection carriers has these numbers.
9. Italy - a G7 country whose health and science are so f*cked that they have no genetic data entered into the WHO database. The clusterf*ckery beggars belief. No wonder they have Cubans, Chinese and Russians saving their arse. Almost as in the good old days of the last smallpox pandemics in the Horn of Africa.
Re:Easy answer. (Score:4, Informative)
Regarding OP's statement on competent leadership or anti-science sentiment, I do not believe that to be the case here. The government has pretty much followed the recommendations of the RIVM, the national health institute. The problem is that the RIVM has consistently been a day late and a dollar short on this one. They kept repeating that the disease wasn't very contagious, that it didn't transfer easily between people, that people who do not have any symptoms will not spread the disease, and that we were well prepared with plenty of capacity in our hospitals. This while the epidemic was in full swing in China and Italy. And keep in mind that these are the scientists rather than the politicians. Some politicians argued against the scientists and demanded that we take more stringent measures.
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Regarding the Netherlands: there is most likely no massaging going on here, it's just that very few people are tested; even high-risk cases like hospital staff are not tested on a regular basis. If you develop symptoms, and they get progressively worse over the course of a few days, then maybe you are tested. The official line on that is that "the outcome of the test wouldn't affect the protocol to follow anyway". Because those protocols also suck.
That explains stuff. Thanks. If you do not test, it is easy to report low numbers.
While at it, and while we are talking about "leadership", there should be a special place in the low circles of Hell reserved for the leaders of the Baltic States and the cretinous vindictive c*nt called Jarosaw Kaczyski. The Russian Il76 squadron delivering aid to Italy was not granted overflight permission so they had to fly to Krasondar south, refuel and then West over the Balkans adding at least 3-4 hours to their journe
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Polish government is generally acting quite random. They made a right decision to lock borders and institute quarantine
But then they didn't set up humanitarian tunet for people trying to come back to their home through Poland.
Now they are talking about still holding elections in May which is just braindead idea.
Still overall response I feel is much better then any other European country.
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2. While I have not found anything official, yet, the question on why the roundabout route has been asked multiple times in the Russian press yesterday and the UNOFFICIAL answer is "no overflight permission". Note - I have not seen an official confirmation of th
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1. You have no confirmation that happened.
2. You don't know if it's Poland that denied flight path either.
3. We already had a false rumour that Poland stoped masks for Italy which was straight up lie
So basically you're spreading baseless rumors that simple deputy to Parliment (who's granted also party leader), personally denied that specific flight.
Yea. Bullshiet
What probably happened is Poland has a standing order to deny all the military flights over Poland, and it was f
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You are welcome to provide an alternative explanation on why they did not fly direct (which is possible only via Poland) and chose a 3h+ detour.
According to flightradar24, they flew over 2 NATO countries - Bulgaria and Croatia .
Military aircraft and aircraft carrying military supplies always have to request overflight permission over the Eu. It looks like they flew where they got a permission and the other route was denied.
I will repeat what I said - i
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Regarding OP's statement on competent leadership or anti-science sentiment, I do not believe that to be the case here. The government has pretty much followed the recommendations of the RIVM, the national health institute. The problem is that the RIVM has consistently been a day late and a dollar short on this one. They kept repeating that the disease wasn't very contagious, that it didn't transfer easily between people, that people who do not have any symptoms will not spread the disease, and that we were well prepared with plenty of capacity in our hospitals. This while the epidemic was in full swing in China and Italy. And keep in mind that these are the scientists rather than the politicians. Some politicians argued against the scientists and demanded that we take more stringent measures.
Effectively in the UK we have the same situation. Public Health England had been advising a "flatten the curve" approach. This was specifically the opposite approach from the one which both the World Health Organisation and China had recommended and seems to have been based on a misreading of the death statistics.
In the case of the UK, the PHE people are scientists but they are scientists that have been carefully chosen as stooges of the drugs companies. Although their advice as scientists has been fol
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9. Italy - a G7 country whose health and science are so f*cked that they have no genetic data entered into the WHO database. The clusterf*ckery beggars belief. No wonder they have Cubans, Chinese and Russians saving their arse. Almost as in the good old days of the last smallpox pandemics in the Horn of Africa.
If you think, even for a moment, that health systems in the rest of the western world are generally in a better shape than in Italy, you are deluding yourself.
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The Bulgarian government is going a bit too far...they just banned people from trekking the Vitosha mountain, which is conveniently right next to the capital (that has almost 2 mln. citizens out of total of 7.2 mln.). What you need is sun and fresh air.. it's a large mountain, what's the problem....
My mother lives in the country side so she has a large garden, but Sofia is already too cramped. I don't get that decision....
Other than that everything is banned including travel within the country (you need a d
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The probably saw all the idiots congregating at the Snowden mountain in the UK, or on the beaches in the UK and Australia. Ban it before people start doing that.
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About these constitutional changes in Germany. There have been no changes, just discussions about a change and it has nothing to do with privacy laws, but with lowering the quorum in times of an emergency so the parliament can still function if more than half of its members is sick.
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Doubtful. By Feb 27 South Korea had tested over 66k people when the USA had only tested 445. As of last Friday South Korea had tested over 300k people while the USA had tested just over 67k as of yesterday.
Compared to the USA, South Korea is a SARS-CoV-2 testing juggernaut.
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I am sorry, but this is all too simplistic. Politicians rarely makes their decisions on their own, they are heavily influenced by so-called experts, the scientists, the media, the public opinion. Your vote for the politicians is obvious, not so your vote for the experts or the media you got.
Here I think we disagree. All countries have both good and bad "experts" with the majority of scientists being the good ones. If you look in the UK then you will see that the chief medical officer was specifically chosen from GSK for political reasons rather than qualifications and that he's the guy who specifically got everything wrong. I'll agree with you that media can be a problem, but again, in almost all countries there is media which is more or less truthful and media, like Fox news which doesn't
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In the U.S. case, there's no way to argue the alleged administration was being influenced by scientists.
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I live in New Zealand and I looked up some of the things that "thesupraman" mentioned in his post eg
"You mean the ones 'closing' schools 'except for children of essential workers' (which seems to include everyone working for local government, food, transport, etc)"
From the NZ official covid-19 website FAQ ( https://covid19.govt.nz/ [covid19.govt.nz] )
"Can kids go to school?
This depends on what Alert Level we are at.
Information about current COVID-19 Alert Level
New Zealand is now at Alert Level 3. Only the children of essent
Large personal space, along with STAYING HOME (Score:2)
Looking at pix of spring breakers (loved how Florida gov. waited until end of spring break to finally order it down), and now seeing pix of ppl gathering at CA's beaches, all disregarding request.
In the states, we are doing this wrong.
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Asians have a much bigger personal space than westerners.
Looking at pix of spring breakers (loved how Florida gov. waited until end of spring break to finally order it down), and now seeing pix of ppl gathering at CA's beaches, all disregarding request.
In the states, we are doing this wrong.
Not all Asian countries. Ever seen commuting pictures in Japan? Also, I live in Vietnam, where personal space is virtually non-existent. I would say in most South-East Asian countries you would see the same.
However, the response in Vietnam has been professional and reassuring. Contact tracing from the very beginning, quarantine zones for suspect patients have been ready for months (converted army barracks, university campuses, etc.), now the country makes test kits to export to other countries, proper prote
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In japan, the trains were a HUGE adoption for the Japanese. Once you are off the train, the standard for Japanese is about a meter. Here is 1 [washingtonpost.com]
Here is 2 [hswstatic.com]
But, I am guessing it is a case of all of the above.
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Population density in Asia is much higher than in the West. "Personal space" is often practically non-existent.
This is why consideration of how your actions impact those around you runs much deeper than in the West.
This consideration is part of the reason why their response was so successful, but it is not the only reason.
Advanced preparation, decisive action, correct priorities and availability of universal and well-oiled health system made most of the difference.
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Advanced preparation, decisive action, correct priorities and availability of universal and well-oiled health system made most of the difference.
IMO, this is what mattered most. Asia was hit by the bird flu, by SARS before and they learned from it.
They assumed that something similar would come in the future, and planning for it was taken seriously, even at high levels.
Western countries did some such planning (e.g. the 2012 study by German Robert Koch-Institut and some federal offices on a Pandemic by a SARS variant that considered a scenario very similar to what is happening now), but apparently it wasn't taken seriously enough by politicians.
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Also look above at the other posting.
I had a Japanese roommate who once commented about how the ONLY place that Japan gets close is on the trains. Even in the airports, they do not crowd (When Yosuke first moved to America, he had to practice speaking, so went out for llunch regularly and talked. Once conversationwe were talking about roads and how narrow Japanese roads are compared to Americas adn conversation went in various directions.;
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Asians have a much bigger personal space than westerners.
You've enever been on a Tokyo subway train, have you? Typically there is a baby (riding on mother's back) pressed against you at the same time as men are holding newspapers folded to handkerchief size over their heads. I'm going to assume that today the newspapers would be keitai (phones).
S Korea is locked down (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends on the number of cases. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even in South Korea, some reasons went into lockdown [thetimes.co.uk] while others did not. It depended on the number of cases: worse-hit areas had lockdown (mostly the city of Daegu) while in less-affected areas had case by case treatment.
Obviously, testing does not cure the virus or prevent disease transmission. The only thing that can prevent transmission is isolation from other people. Testing allows you to isolate the infected people, while other people can go about their lives. However, once the number of infections (particularly undetected infections) reaches a certain level, it is not practical to isolate the infected individuals, so you have to isolate everyone. Daegu, Korea has reached this point, and so have Western countries.
exactly one size does not fit all..city vs country (Score:2)
south korea had different responses for different regions and actually tested everything...
while everyone else brute forces the response... the only thing you need to brute force is testing...
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Here in the Philippines schools were closed from March 10th and strict quarantine for everyone except essential services workers started on 16th, despite that the country only had between one and 200 cases at the time.
The reason is that the country had very limited capacity for testing. I applaud the government for acting quickly. Manila is the most densely populated city in the world, and within days it could have been an absolute calamity. I expect the situation to deteriorate pretty badly, however it cou
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You can't fight a war against an enemy who is invisible until he's defeated you.
Without a massive and early testing program, you don't know when you have to take actions like shutting down a local economy until it's too late. You can't know for sure which ones should be shut down. You have no idea when might be a good time to lift restrictions.
As Benjamin Franklin said, failing to prepare is preparing to fail. Korea has been more successful than the US in getting ahead of this problem, and will likely be
UK Govt (palm face) (Score:3)
The UK government has once again shown their ignorance / stupidity / prioritising economy over life.
This is their herd immunity crap again, they want us all to catch this virus and damn the consequences.
Their new plan is to isolate some vulnerable people for 12 weeks:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
Flaws:
(1) These aren't the only vulnerable people, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure are also risk factors, does the government not care if these people die?
(2) "Strictly avoid contact with someone who is displaying symptoms of coronavirus." This blows my mind, do these stupid ***** not understand that this virus is highly contagious before symptoms appear and indeed most infections occur before symptoms have appeared. How can the government get this so wrong at this point? They've been making this same huge error for weeks now. It's shocking incompetence.
(3) Property in the UK is very expensive, high multiple of average earnings type thing, rents are sky high. So how does the government think these people are going to isolate? When they live with family? When often they will be sharing a room with significant other? They did not think this through. This virus is airborne for up to 3 hours. As someone with an air quality meter I can tell you that just opening a windows in 1 room to clear/ventilate it stops working within minutes after closing the window - air mixes with the rest of the air in the house surprisingly rapidly probably caused by temperature variations. How are people in shared households going to share a toilet/bathroom without getting infected, do they expect family members to wear masks and gloves whilst preparing food? If medical staff can't avoid getting this virus then how do the expect the general public to do better?
(4) In a week or two, the UK hospitals will be overwhelmed, we will have people dying as fast as they are in Italy and the death rate in Italy hasn't slowed down much yet.
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I'm no fan of Johnson an his cabal of ass holes, but FFS try applying your name.
prioritising economy over life.
They. Are. Not. Separable.
If you totally fuck the economy then you will totally fuck funding to the NHS and that will cause more deaths in the medium to long term. the reason we have long life expectancy is because our economy supports that.
What we have here is a country sized trolley problem except we don't even know who is on which track.
But ALL choices have consequences and all will involve som
Re:They are not wrong. Just way too late. (Score:4, Informative)
"It is a quite harmless disease for the vast majority of people. "
Less bad than the flu, are you kidding me?
Tell it to the Italians:
[Italy] Coronavirus Cases:
59,138
Deaths:
5,476
Recovered:
7,024
https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
Does that look like flu numbers to you?
"So it is not wrong, to separate only those people"
Did you read my whole post? I pointed out why this is not feasible, it's one of those it sounds good ideas until you actually stop and consider what it would actually mean for the millions of people that are supposed to do it in a country with a major housing shortage. If well trained medical staff with good equipment can't avoid catching this virus then how on earth are the public supposed to avoid catching it??
"Would have been political suicide"
And letting a half million people die isn't political suicide?
Right now the western governments failings have been - 1. Not fully understanding the nature of the problem*. 2. Explaining all of the most relevant points to the public. 3. Taking necessary measures to slow the spread of the virus in a timely manner.
*The govt clearly do not have good info' - The virus is infecting people before symptoms appear, this is well documented and easy to check. But the UK gov't has repeatedly said once a person develops symptoms - take action, NO, it is too late, you do not wait for symptoms to appear, you contact trace or you explain to people to contact everyone they have met and tell them to stay the fuck at home until tested negative or until 2 weeks have passed. You do not just carry on and infect a half a dozen people before maybe getting symptoms [palm-face].
We've probably left it too long, the gov'ts are all populist right now and populist gov't don't have the balls to do anything that makes people uncomfortable. This is going to go very very badly, guaranteed now.
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For what it's worth, the current covid-19 casualty numbers are about half of an average flu season in Italy. It seems many people don't understand how many people die from the flu each year. In the US alone, the average annual death rate [cdc.gov] is about 26000 over the past 5 years.
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The numbers are still rising exponentially.
Tell me, how do the daily numbers of people dying from seasonal flu in Italy compare with the daily numbers of people dying from COVID-19 in Italy right now?
And does the US have roughly 6x the population of Italy?
Are the US hospitals in a dire state of emergency every time the seasonal flu comes round?
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It is a quite harmless disease for the vast majority of people. Less bad than the flu. And we ARE ALL about to catch it, sooner or later.
The reason for the drastic measures is becaus of the few for whom it is bad because they are already weak and sick even without it, and we can't handle all at the same time.
There is a 12 year old girl in my state, with no known preexisting conditions, on a ventilator right now. That's the problem: while we know people over 60 or with preexisting conditions are susceptible to the disease (and really those 2 groups are pretty similar, you'd be hard pressed to find a 70-80 year old without some kind of preexisting condition, even if they're "healthy"), healthy people can get hit hard by it too, but there are no obvious trends. Usually diseases that hit the elderly hard hit you
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It's long past time to shut down this "less bad than the flu" meme. It's true that most people will only have minor symptoms, but that's true of the flu too -- most flu cases go unreported because they're mild.
COVID-19 is worse than the flu in every way that counts. It's about twice as contagious, has hospitalization rates and death rates an order of magnitude higher. Our hospital system is *already sized* for seasonable flu, and this thing is very likely going to swamp it.
Same as Japan (Score:5, Informative)
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Exactly. People in those countries can follow instructions and not spend the day buying stores out of shit paper. Look at all the morons in Florida along with the moron mayor who wouldn't close the beaches. Now surprise surprise watch the infections skyrocket.
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Some of the social norms might disappear if the system works well. I bet the rest of the transmutable diseases are angry at the corona as it ill make people wash their hands for a while...
Anecdotal: me and my countrymen (BG) were terrified after we moved to NL when we got invited to visit a family with a newborn.....2 days after it was born! And nobody removed their shoes!! And everyone was touching the baby!!! The Bulgarian women in particular were absolutely outraged. In our tradition the religion incorpo
Social shame more prevalent in asian countries (Score:2)
Culturally, family and social shame is much stronger in asian cultures, whereas in America, we value freedom and independence.
As I look at pictures of people on spring break, and understand the latent duration of infectiousness, many people will find out AFTER the fact that they should have listened to the government advice.
My wife and I are going through some possible early symptoms (long term digestive issues), and she's in the healthcare field as a front-line nurse. But they symptoms are not the "golden
Shown to have no shame. (Score:2)
How do you expect to shame the sort of people who openly call this thing "Boomer Remover"? I mean it's one thing to use the term as gallows humor, but most uses of the term are not that.
Contact Tracing, it works. (Score:5, Interesting)
... those who test positive to reconstruct their recent whereabouts. That information, stripped of personal identifiers, is shared on social media apps that allow others to determine whether they may have crossed paths with an infected person...
Gee, that sounds like Contact Tracing, which, you know, the WHO has been telling countries to do since, like, the beginning. Who would have thought that actually works, eh?
https://www.who.int/features/q... [who.int]
Like it was again explained in an early-March interview about how China responded to the virus: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0... [nytimes.com]
"They’re managing massive amounts of data, because they’re trying to trace every contact of 70,000 cases."
OTOH, we have from the CDC back in early March -- "CDC: Contact Tracing Not Needed for HCPs Exposed to COVID-19"
https://www.medpagetoday.com/i... [medpagetoday.com]
Is it any wonder why the infection numbers are what they are at now?
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The only 'social' contact I had yesterday was buying gasoline. So I touched the handle of the pump. How many people touch than hand in a day? GPS can't tell you which of the 16 pumps at that station each person used.
I am not denying tracing works, I am trying to understand where the lines are drawn t
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Pump number prints on the receipt. If you don't have that, the station might have those records. Of course, a responsible gas station might sanitize the pump handle and keypad every hour or two if there's a known pandemic going on. That would at least reduce exposure and shrink the time window of infection.
Their secret? Just off the top of my head... (Score:2)
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You could have elected a part-time drama teacher who had no understanding of how the world works at all instead. Canada didn't even lock it's borders down until the US forced Canada to do so. It didn't have any screeners at the airports until provinces against federal orders started posting their own screeners at airports. Roxham Rd(the primary point of illegal crossings from the US to Canada) wasn't closed until almost 4 days AFTER the borders were supposedly closed, and it didn't happen until Quebec sa
test numbers (Score:3)
This has puzzled me to no end for many days:
Why do we have numbers for cases, deaths and recovered, even on github, but no current data on number of tests?
This one missing number changes everything. For example, I'm tracking numbers for my home country and the growth seems to have slowed for the 2nd day now - but if that is simply because fewer tests have been conducted, then there may not actually be a slow down.
I really wonder how this isn't a bigger discussion point. Anyone with even one semester of statistics should spot that an important base number is simply missing - or where they are published, hopelessly outdated. I mean, look at the worldometer page: The cases and deaths are current (data from today). The testing numbers are from March 9 - are you kidding me? That's ancient history.
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Have you seen them up-to date and globally, or only for a few countries and outdated (because that I've seen as well, but it's meaningless).
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I agree and it is even worse: Even if we had the number of tests, these are not a random sample. If it is not a random sample, we would need to know the exact decision process or the numbers are pretty meaningless.
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But that is only the US.
A few other countries (South Korea, Austria, etc.) also report numbers, though not daily updated.
But the bigger picture is missing, and not enough countries report regularily to allow comparisons or calculate a meaningful average.
Its secret? (Score:2)
Nobody pays cash, so every encounter can be retraced.
In the US, not so much and I don't even mention the corner boys distributing drugs and virus for the same price.
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Spanish Flu (Score:2)
The biggest killer in the Spanish Flu was the second wave, not the first (or the third).
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I think we can get a handle on that if we can deploy enough test capacity early enough. There will be a second wave as we attempt to restart the economy, but it doesn't have to be worse.
I live in South Korea (Score:3, Interesting)
I live in South Korea and this summary is not quite right.
What is helping us is compliance. People are still free but we are being very careful not to touch each other or get near each other. We are still free to go places but people stay far from each other.
I think US is just discovering cases by testing that were already there, and the virus was spreading a lot before US started testing. I think the US lockdown will help except people are still making crowds. People need to keep distance to prevent spreading the virus.
Here we are still keeping away even though we don't have many new cases. I think another month will be ok.
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So it's secret is (Score:2)
An oppressive government able to pry into your private life at will, able to jail you at will and able to spend money without prior authorizations.
People have died for less.
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Oh, yeah. South Korea is a real dystopia.
How (Score:2)
2. Been open with its own citizens.
3. Getting its own citizens ready. Been ready over years for health events due to past health events.
4. Sick with wuflu? Get tracked. Everyone around you gets tested and tracked.
5. Never wait for the WHO and UN to do anything. Nations must act to protect their own citizens.
6. Dont do what France, Sweden and Italy did due to politics.
After the Virus lock down, more medical issues (Score:2)
Where I am going with this. Will their be a larger population with high blood pressure, over weight, higher sugar?
Now, I will say this
Different focus from US (Score:2)
Temperatures (Score:2)
Coronavirus Cases Have Dropped Sharply
Temperatures rose sharply.
Use caution with the South Korean numbers (Score:2)
They're doing things right but the numbers are distorted by the huge number of cases from that one megachurch. Once those got better, it was like a rabbit finishing its way through a python. In other words, the drop *might* be because they're doing things right, but there's a confounding factor.
Demographics matter, older populations hurt more.. (Score:2)
...which is not to say that other factors have no effect (contact, monitoring & tracing, healthcare capacity etc.)
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We're still recording exponential growth in the US. See the chart here: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
That includes the fact that we're testing limited. At least, we think we are because most of the anecdotal reports from hospitals in the US is that they have either no testing kits or single digit kits available. The CDC stopped providing testing data in early March (presumably because the numbers aren't good). The ability to test & contract t