Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

>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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com