Hacker News Reader

Comment by dirtyid | Hacker News Reader

South Korea is basically an island, conducted serendipitous did large scale pandemic drill in December, has a compliant population with mandatory civil service and memory of recent authoritarian government, can mobilize techno-authoritarian surveillance.

My question is, what is happening in Japan? Except wide spread mask usage, they have systemic undertesting at 1/6 capacity, no social distance measures, nothing shutdown, old population like Italy. Their hospitals should have been overwhelmed with dead by now. Are they just leaving the old to die at home? France and Italy aren't counting deaths at home as part of statistics. Maybe something similar? Which loops back to S.Korea, why so eager to trust their numbers. Their politics is fairly corrupt.

View on HN

> South Korea is basically an island, conducted serendipitous did large scale pandemic drill in December, has a compliant population with mandatory civil service and memory of recent authoritarian government, can mobilize techno-authoritarian surveillance.

And they didn't even try to shutdown churches, bars and clubs, while churches consistently have been the largest sources of mass infection. And your may also want to know that literally every single media has been criticizing every single action taken by the government. What an authoritarian government.

> Which loops back to S.Korea, why so eager to trust their numbers. Their politics is fairly corrupt.

They earned their trust by reporting 7000 cases, taking the risks of huge political disadvantages. All the other first world countries were reluctant on doing that due to the exact opposite motivations. And unless you have some ideas on the modern political landscapes in S.K., I would recommend not to inconsiderately speak up a such fairly strong opinion.

I didn't say they were authoritarian government but a large segment of SK population grew up under SK dictatorship which has implications on compliance. Same with Taiwan, Singapore is still single party dictatorship etc. I'm well aware of the domestic SK reaction (negative) around alleged mishandling of the response which is just extra incentive to manipulate test data. Cho Kuk was 6 months ago. Record high unemployment since GFC. Nothing about this administration suggest it's not above fixing stats on top of overall high testing rate especially with the high stakes of underperforming. Almost every SK president has been mired in corruption scandals, many were imprisoned for shady dealings. Why would this be any different?

Yeah, they could have found a working formula, but they could also be lying like other first world countries that we know are under reporting deaths via recatorigzation of likely covid deaths to other deaths to depress the impact. SK corruption and transparency index is comparable to France and Italy who already acknowledged doing so. Add the geopolitical layer of western media trying to grasp at any alternative strategy that doesn't involve Chinese style lockdown. Very few reports even mentions SK contact tracing is closer to Chinese techno-authoritarian techniques than not, which ultimately makes SK response not a useful model for these countries until they get desperate. Which is my main point, media is fixating on SK testing and contact tracing when latter is not possible in many first world countries.

Lots of theories. They have a culture that doesn't shake hands or hug, they caught cases early and had a relatively low infection rate (they claim 80% did not spread the virus), a culture of wearing face masks or possibly it is just due to low testing rates and is actually worse than the numbers suggest.

source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-19/a-coronav...

I have no idea where this stereotype comes from, but South Korea is known for militant political movement (eg, labor unions, super right-wingers) and religious fanatics:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/27/coronavirus-south-korea...

What stereotype are you referring to?

> ... compliant population with mandatory civil service and memory of recent authoritarian government, can mobilize techno-authoritarian surveillance. ...

Isn't it relative to western countries? S.Korea is like Israel, a large part of the population with civil service experience who can follow instructions, but also some religious fanatics / cults who don't give a fuck. The government has more accessible, non-emergency options to crackdown, last I heard Korean officials is trying to contain the cults via lawsuit and criminal charges. Can you imagine US suing a church, arresting a pastor for holding congregation? In Canada we have been trying to recall our citizens abroad and it wasn't until things got bad that 1million+ snow birds decided to return. Prior to that kids were going on spring break. No one took things seriously until last week after a month escalating warnings. And this is in a city with SARS experience. Down south is even more of a shit show. As for techno-authoritarian surveillance - health officials cross referencing CCTV footage, location data and cred card reports - that would not fly here as a "public" option which is why it's rarely mentioned in any of these TEST OFTEN and contact trace articles. The uninformed would attribute those techniques to China. The informed would immediately understand that wouldn't work in many western countries without massive legislative overhaul.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com