This worries me. South Korea's mass testing alone was not enough to contain the coronavirus outbreak; they relied on social distancing measures too: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-southk...
Actually worse than China by that metric, though given credibility issues of Chinese data, let's just say about the same.
Countries with large outbreaks are only testing people with severe symptoms. Korea is testing anyone who comes near someone with the virus. So are catching close to everyone who has it.
SK and China went for full containment: every single positive case is hospitalized and close contacts are quarantined in hotels so few cases are missed.
While in New York, hospitals are focused on saving critical patients. If you test positive but have mild symptoms, you are usually let home anyway so it doesn't really make sense to test most people who would be taken very seriously in Asia.
There are zero deaths and zero cases in Turkmenistan, must have gotten their treatment protocols tight.
It's mind boggling anyone has to ask now this has been going on so long but here goes.
1) They had an approach plan beforehand because they had observed the previous SARS epidemic and took the danger seriously.
2) They had "quarantine hotels" freely available for those who were positive to prevent them from infecting others. (Seattle has a few of these, I've heard but they aren't widespread in the US. The idea of housing people freely is anethema to the US.)
3) They did testing early and often.
4) Their doctors and nurses worked with full PPEs, full anti-contamination suits, so they didn't themselves massively spread the illness.
5) They reserved hospitals specifically for the epidemic and had protocols for sending people to these hotel.
6) They had drive through testing and other testing easily and freely available (the US plan of profiting from testing is just so "I can't even").
7) They did systematic contact tracing with an app for people to discover where infectious people had been.
8) They did social distancing with mask from the start.
-- The US had literally done NONE of this. What the US has done is last-ditch efforts by states after the ostensibly responsible parties (the CDC etc) failed massively. And the Federal government is now literally sabotaging the states.
- With exponential growth, most cases will new and so not become potentially lethal. This can lower the observed fatality rate (I think this explained Germany's original "great" rate which doesn't look at great any more).
- With cases rising quickly, most countries don't have infrastructure or the time to increase testing (US testing is failing on multiple levels but even France, Spain and Italy are just overwhelmed with the sick and testing is less important).
- With cases rising quickly, the fatality rate increases as hospitals are no longer able to provide adequate care.
- Different countries have different age-profiles and the disease hits the elderly harder (but once hospitals break down, the odds for the young decrease).
South Korea's fatality rate is similar to the ostensible fatality rate of Turkey and Luxembourg but likely for different rate. We probably won't have a complete idea what's happened until these events are done.
If you are effective at preventing the spread, then you can get lucky in terms of protecting the more vulnerable. I'd love to see some demographic breakdowns of deaths/infections in SK to see if they mirror the general population, or skew a different direction.
This reduces the rate of spread by catching community transmission before the end of its cycle. And it's worked with other outbreaks in the past. But it depends on having a very large available pool of rapid testing, so you can't do it when you have thousands of cases per day. But a few dozen... probably. It definitely seems to be working in Korea.
But again, it only works once the outbreak is well contained. Stay home.
Not necessarily. You can just aggressively quarantine - basically the strategy in China.
> so you can't do it when you have thousands of cases per day
At what scale? Iceland was able to do it with ~200 new cases per day per million. The majority of US states haven't had spikes this high - nowhere in CA has even come close to that.
For some reason, we've only recently started building up the volunteer armies needed to do this (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-coronav...) - this should have been done on day 1.
Iceland's per capita new infection rate peaked higher than basically any nation in the world, and while it's dropping comparatively rapidly it hasn't reached a stable baseline yet. I don't think this is a good example at all.
While it's clear their lockdown "worked" (in the sense of recovering them from a disastrous peak), I think it's still very much an open question as to whether their testing capacity will sustain this success.
To that point, their death rate is lower than the Bay Area.
To a second point, Iceland is under a very weak lockdown, if you can even call it that. Their elementary schools remain open.