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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

In South Korea epidemic was started with one sick cult member spreading it to wast number of people. In Italy the person who started Lombardy cluster was first asymptomatic for weeks, was later misdiagnosed and spreading the disease in hospital. It seems that the epidemic is starting without similar super-spreaders in Japan.

Case fatality deaths to recovered rate in Japan is 18%. In South Korea it's 6.6%. This might indicate that Japan has 3X larger undocumented/documented rate.

This early in the exponential curve 2x difference is just 1-2 week delay.

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The outlier is that Japanese statistics don't seem to show an exponential curve at all. Their highest daily counts of new cases remain in mid-February, and they've been oscillating closely around 50 a day for over 2 weeks now. There's almost surely undertesting happening based on their testing criteria, but even with fixed testing criteria, exponential growth at any rate above like 10% per day should have been obvious in severe cases by now.

Could be that social norms of Japan make the exponent approximately 1. It's a stretch, but not impossible.

There were 30 or so cases before the Shincheonji contagion, in which, yes, one cult member single-handedly tripled the number of cases in one day. But at the usual 33% per day intra-country contagion rate, even single-handedly tripling the number of cases only moves the calendar forward by about 4 days.

I do agree that Japan probably has diagnosed a much smaller proportion of cases.

IIRC, there were no new case or low single digit cases for almost a full week before the ShinCheonJi outbreak, after which the number of cases increased to three digits new cases per day.

You're right about that, and that would amount to effective containment, so I guess I was wrong.

Notably, there's a big difference between South Korea - which seems to largely have largely gotten the epidemic under control, and Italy where it seems to be totally out of control despite a severe lockdown.

Whats a key difference between South Korea and Italy? Widespread use of face masks.

>Whats a key difference between South Korea and Italy? Widespread use of face masks.

Gonna wager a guess that there are vast amount of differences between South Korea and Italy that could affect the spread of a virus.

Indeed. Italy has among the highest rates of working adults living with their parents in the world for one.

And South Korea has the highest rate of soju drinkers.

If you’re gonna pull a statistic out of a shadowy place, at least explain its link to the question.

(For the record South Koreans drink twice as much alcohol as Italians)

https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/publications/global_alco...

People were going to work in Italy in non-essential industries until recently. Those workers went home to their aged parents. Countries with lower rates of working aged adults living with the elderly are likely to have higher infection rates of a particularly vulnerable age group than those where such living situations are less common.

That’s a very good point.

There must be multiple social and environmental factors that have contributed to Italy being hit so hard (age of population, high rates of smoking and high levels of air pollution have also been suggested), but that could well be one of them.

No. It's early testing and quarantine at scale

Patient zero in Lombardy has never been found.

The guy that that fellow in Codogno met could have brought back contaminated item from Wuhan

Have you got any source on this? If you do you should contact italian authorities.

Lots of Chinese staffed sweat shops are manufacturing "Made in Italy" products.

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