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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Is there a better source for this than a report of a press conference? Like, a paper? The KCDC is highly competent, and maybe the English-language Korean press isn't as bad as the US press ("Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No." "The flu killed more people." "Healthy people wearing masks doesn't help.") but I really have no way to judge. And I've been burned too many times this year already by trusting the ignorant dabblers we call journalists.

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To learn more about coronavirus, treatment and vaccine development from the perspective of doctors in S. Korea, try watching these interviews in order. Each is about 30 - 50 min long. I posted the links and the dates they were uploaded. The videos are excellent because the doctors are not interrupted with questions.

1) 2020.03.27

1st interview with Professor Kim, leading expert on coronavirus in Korea. In Korean with excellent English subtitles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAk7aX5hksU

2) 2020.04.14

2nd interview with Professor Kim, leading expert on coronavirus in Korea. In Korean with excellent English subtitles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwoNP9QWr4Y&t=1081s

3) 2020.04.25

Interview with the Director General of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) about COVID-19 Vaccine. It's in English.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cYWd0N8nO4&t=120s

4) Note in the interview with Prof Kim uploaded on 2020.04.14, they were still not sure if a recovered patient testing positive again was due to reactivation/reinfection or not. They were still trying to confirm it as of 2020.04.14.

But it seems the yna.co.kr article posted on 2020.04.29 confirms recovered coronavirus patients may have tested positive again due to traces of virus fragments that have been inactivated.

5) I'm hoping the Youtube channel will upload another interview with Prof Kim about covid-19 soon.

Interviews with doctors are interesting from a human empathy perspective, but I really want to be reading papers, not watching interviews, and I want the papers to be by epidemiologists, not just doctors.

Have you watched the 3 interviews? I'm not picking a fight nor judging. Just curious. I called them interviews but really they are like lectures in my opinion. The doctors speak most of the time.

I'm not a doctor but I figure doctors are too busy collecting/digesting data to publish quality papers? Especially when new data is being generated at a fast rate?

There is an issue of many research papers covering Covid-19 not getting enough peer review before being made available to public and covered by news media.

Prof Kim's called this a "Thesis Pandemic", a flood of Covid-19 related research papers being put out by researchers that get covered by new media before they are peer reviewed. And apparently many of the papers are made public by the researchers without enough data to really back up their thesis.

Because the virus is so new, there is really not enough data. And the researchers are doing their best to help with finding treatment, but apparently many of the papers are not peer reviewed enough before being picked out by news media to be covered.

I did google and found a few reading material below but not sure if it's what you are looking for.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/6/20-0251_article

No, I haven't, because I don't want to spend my time watching videos; not only are they agonizingly slow, they are also a medium actively hostile to quantitative data and critical analysis, which is perhaps why the news media is so fond of them. (I don't want to pick a fight either, but I sure as hell am judging!)

Everything you say is true, except that mostly doctors are not busy collecting data, but rather treating patients.

You may have intended to link a different paper; the one you linked is about Gansu in China, not Korea, and does not mention rt-PCR, false positives, viral RNA, or reinfection or recurrence. It does mention "secondary infection" and "secondary cases", but, as it explains, that means people who were infected within the study region by other people ("indigenous"), rather than coming into the region from outside ("imported").

1. Googled "Korea University Medicine covid-19 papers" and found below 2 links. Professor Kim in video 1 and 2 is from Korea University.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.15.20036368v...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197122...

2. Also found below link on cnn.com

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/8/20-1274_article

Yah my quick search didn't return much on papers discussing false positives, viral RNA, or reinfection or recurrence. I'm guessing it's too new for formal papers.

I should've said doctors are busy treating patients and researchers are busy collecting data.

3. But I did find below article posted 12 hrs ago

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-so...

South Korean expert panel has concluded that dead virus fragments were the likely cause of more than 290 people in the country testing positive after recovery for coronavirus.

4. The 2 videos with subtitles can be consumed fast if you skip forward a few seconds at a time as you can read English subtitles. Commenters also posted helpful summaries so you can get to just the topic you are interested.

Maybe, the following research papers from germany's top expect on Sars-Cov-II are interesting to you: - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x?utm_source... - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0695-z

and his latest article, on Twitter yesterday: https://zoonosen.charite.de/fileadmin/user_upload/microsites...

He is also doing a podcast with already 37 episodes about Covid-19, but it is only available in German. But the German transcripts contain links to articles he discusses. And those are articles he deems good enough to discuss them in public, even though they are often just preprints. https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/Coronavirus-Update-Die-P... -

While these three papers are indeed good and valuable, they do not seem to mention Korea or touch on the question of why, and how often, rt-PCR tests continue to return positive after remission of symptoms, and in particular whether these apparently reinfected patients are contagious. I am not sure why you mentioned them.

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