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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

If you look at the data here [1] (desktop edition because the mobile edition doesn't have drill down), you can see that all countries (including Asian) are following the same pattern in the "daily increase" graph (click a country on the left to see its data). The only outliers are China and South Korea (flatline), and Japan (flattened curve).

So while masks may have some effect, it hasn't been enough to give different graphs to Asian nations in general.

[1] https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594...

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Wait, which countries are we referencing outside of those three?

Thailand looks straightforwardly exponential so far and has fairly heavy mask use, agreed. But Singapore, Taiwan, and arguably Malaysia seem too early to call: they're still plausibly on either of a European curve or South Korea's ramp-then-flatline.

Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, and Burma all seem to be below the line for meaningful data. And Hong Kong isn't broken out. So I guess my questions are: do Indonesia and the Philipines have "mask cultures" to a level comparable to South Korea and Japan, and are their testing regimes wide enough to rely on those curves?

I don't know the answer to that. And I agree that the "masks work" graph/meme circulating is questionable. But unless I'm missing something/somewhere, this data just looks like "too soon to call"?

Did you read the NPR article? The very first chart shows that there is a big difference between the various countries. The logarithmic scale allows for much better visualisation than the almost nonsensical charts on the John Hopkins statistics page. The circles are also a completely inadequate visualisation. I.e. much better would be coloring countries by incident rate per 100.000 inhabitants.

They do a good job collecting all the data but a seriously bad job visualising them.

Yeah, except you happily disregard the fact that a lot of asian countries including china have reimported cases mostly from Europe and the US. I'm pretty curious how this plays out in those countries.

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