To be clear, the Korean government officially still recommends social distancing. They are especially worried about the family picnics mentioned in the article, and have officially closed many public parks in response.
To repeat: don't take this as a sign that Korea believes it has successfully managed the outbreak.
I'm actually slightly worried as Singapore seemed to have handled the crisis quite well with only 1000ish cases for the longest time, but have now had cases balloon from only around 1350 total cases two weeks ago to 6000 today.
Certainly, a lot of it has to with migrant workers and their living situations, but it also underscores how even when you have things under control, the virus can spread rapidly when your guard is down.
To repeat: don't take this as a sign that Korea believes it has successfully managed the outbreak.
South Korea has had fewer deaths than other nations, South Korea has a semi-open economy now. What better model for managing the outbreak is there? (The condition of Europe and the US look very dismal) It's kind of strange seeing this claim with no substantiation beside "repeat" apparently staying on the top of HN for a while.
South Korea hasn't entirely averted the danger and is clearly still keeping it in mind. The virus is going to be around for a while and normalizing life is needed and it seems South Korea has to the testing and contact tracing infrastructure needed for this. What is the counter-argument?
The article and discussions about Korea seem to mainly revolve around testing and contact tracing. These are complex and expensive, and substantially more difficult to manage in a country like the US which is 7x the population, and is somewhat decentralized (50 states).
Meanwhile, the on the street observations in the article are: masks, masks, masks. Masks are cheap and easy. So let's start with masks, masks, masks first while we figure out and ramp up testing and contact tracing.
the first Apple store to reopen outside China had lines snaking out the door as many South Koreans -- almost all wearing masks
At Han River park in Seoul’s Banpo district, families -- also in masks -- were having picnics
including requiring voters to wear masks and disposable plastic gloves while casting their ballots
People are still wearing masks and mind talking face-to-face with strangers
Do we know yet whether the clusters of fatalities among families are due to higher exposure rates or some genotypic susceptibility to the worst effects of the illness?
Or is that just that the family clusters are good news copy (ugh) and over-represented?
You can't top mitigation/supression until there is herd immunity.
You can get the immunity only two ways 1) enough people have been gone trough the disease or 2) vaccination.
South Korea must use mitigation/supression until they have enough people vaccinated or it flares up again. Complete eradication without immunity is not feasible unless you isolate whole country from the rest of the world permanently.
Very surprised to find out country (city) in HN's top page!
For people who are interested in current Korea's situation:
There were 18 new cases two days ago, and 8 new cases yesterday.
The number of new cases have been consistently falling since April 14th.
'Intense social distancing' was stopped yesterday (April 19th),
and the Korean government is planning to drop the 'social distancing' policy on May 5th.
Schools are planned to open on May 6th, and the ban of churches, bars, etc. are expected to be dropped in the following days (probably tomorrow).
The KCDC is saying that to drop the 'social distancing',
there should consistently have less than 30 cases (which is true for a week)
and cases which infection routes are unknown should be less than 5% of all new cases.
(It was about 5%~10% when it was announced, and AFAIK it's now true.)
There's still some anxiety because people started to become dull to the social distancing movement - so people are worrying that new cases might increase.
What about international flights? Are airports in SK still closed? I'm pretty sure they will have to limit traffic into and out of the country despite easing social distancing.
Otherwise, won't there be a new wave of infections when they let 'outsiders' back in from places where the virus is still running rampant?
> There were 18 new cases two days ago, and 8 new cases yesterday.
> Korean government is planning to drop the 'social distancing' policy on May 5th.
Are the people divided about whether it was a good idea to wait until new cases got this low before making decisions about moving forward? Or is there very broad support for the kind of discipline it takes to wait until May 5 despite the cases being so low already?
Have people's opinions about the appropriate level of response become politicized? Have the facts and statistics and science of it all become politicized?
There was the election of the National Assembly on April 15th, and it ended in an overwhelming victory for the party of the government. IMHO COVID-19 has shown how the current government is different to the last government that handled MERS - which was impeached (the percentage of supporters have greatly increased during the COVID-19 outbreak).
South Korea demonstrated from the beginning on how to deal with this (despite their slow start - which still is super quick compared to most western countries).
But its completely wrong to think they passed it. They also have massive impediments at the moment. Back to normal? Far from it.
I am stuck in my flat in Spain for the 5th week now. Just read they extended it another two, to 8 in total. I am wondering how other countries can be a bit more relaxed (UK and Belgium are allowed out for an our for exercise), or in the case of Sweeden a lot more relaxed, and are still managing to flatten their curves.
“South Korea's foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, speaking to the BBC last week, said the key lessons from her country are that it developed testing for the virus even before it had a significant number of cases. "In mid-January, our health authorities quickly conferred with the research institutions here [to develop a test]," Kang said. "And then they shared that result with the pharmaceutical companies, who then produced the reagent [chemical] and the equipment needed for the testing."
> U.S. has swelled to more than 700,000 while Korea [...] have slowed to just over 10,000.
Comparing absolutes is not very useful so I thought I'd double check this. The difference is obviously less when normalized but the US is still an order of magnitude worse than SK:
South Korea: 234 deaths 8042 recovered. China: 4632 deaths, 77k recovered[1]. Their treatment protocol is an order of magnitude better than every other country. What are they doing that we're not? This is a huge glaring discrepancy. What's the difference between their treatment protocols and everyone else's?
Yes, but once the outbreak is at a low enough level, and you have sufficient test bandwidth, you can manage it via testing and tracing. Everyone who gets sick, with anything, gets tested (in some variants of the plan every everywhere gets tested every N days). If you find a positive, quarantine them and test everyone they came in contact with. Repeat.
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.
The US was disastrous at testing initially, but now they are doing a lot of tests (several million). Unfortunately given the stage they are at (infections widespread, still no national lockdown, some states opening up again because they think it's all over), it's too late for test and trace.
On a per capita basis yes, but the US has done more tests than any other country. Once the US doubles testing capacity again it will be on par with other large countries.
I've been watching quite a lot of US mainstream media these days and I can confirm that this is not true.
For all of MSNBC's faults, their anchors have been repeating testing like a broken record. They even mention how much they sound like a broken record but that testing is simply the most important thing in reopening, and that the US is doing very little of it.
how was south korea able to scale up their testing so fast. Where did the extra testing capacity come from. I've been really curious about this but haven't seen any good answers so far.
It is am extremely stark example of the value of maintaining manufacturing capacity in your country. Korea can makes tests, so they have tests.
Seegene, a company that makes Covid-19 testing equipment is in Korea. They just needed approval and to ramp up manufacturing. For most countries, like the US, we don't have the manufacturing ability anymore, so we have to go beg and buy tests while we figure how to make again. Seegene alone has been responsible for 80% of the tests in Korea.
South Korea has far superior legal framework for pandemic compared to most western countries. As soon as there is a sign of a beginning pandemic, the medical professionals automatically get a massive increase in power and can start enacting lots of policies regardless of what politician think.
They where probably better prepared as well. Preparedness varies a lot. In the Nordic region where I am from the Finns have done better than the rest of us because they are a prepper nation. They constantly prepare for the worst.
Finland has enormous bunkers under their cities that can hold the whole population with air filters, water, food stock piles etc. Finland has massive stock piles of medical equipment, even stockpiles of raw materials for making ammunition medication etc.
In many ways I think it has paid for them to not be NATO members. They know they are alone and have to take care of themselves just like in the winter war against the Soviet Union.
In Norway I think we place too much faith in NATO. If it was up to me I would get the hell out and focus on self reliance instead.
"Korean officials enacted a key reform, allowing the government to give near-instantaneous approval to testing systems in an emergency. Within weeks of the current outbreak in Wuhan, China, four Korean companies had manufactured tests from a World Health Organization recipe and, as a result, the country quickly had a system that could assess 10,000 people a day."
Before the virus affected anyone in Korea the president brought together many heads of industry, and ramped up masks/testing/essential item production.
Won't this reignite the spreading of the virus? Like, they missed a few people who were asymptotic and not tested, and are roaming the streets with other people?
Almost certainly. Nobody realistically thinks that we'll be able to reach a steady state where new outbreaks never happen. But they were able to suppress the outbreak in Daegu, so there's reason to be confident they can do it again.
Does it show the success of their approach? Given that new cases hit the hospitals 2 weeks after exposure it seems like it is far too soon to know that.
Also, over what timeline are we talking? South Korea has fewer deaths now, will that be the case in two years time?
I've seen a lot of articles lately drawing conclusions from the state of the world as it exists now. But this is a highly dynamic situation. Today's assumptions are next month's fallacies. We need more humility.
On the other hand, they have something like 65 re-infected people. Could it be that they have a different/new strain ?
Edit I don't see why the downvotes. It is easily fact-checkable. Those 65 persons were hospitalized for their symptoms, considered treated and released and about 2 weeks later showed symptoms again.
We need to wait until we have antibody testing to get a clear picture about this.
A theory is that these asymptomatic cases simply had latent virus in their nasal passages (thus testing positive), and not actually be building any antibodies from an infection.
And public masks, good contact tracking, and they say gloves but hand PPE, like alcohol, also I assume a good isolation system that doesn't scare people but seen no reports on this.
Investing on making testing to be cheap and quick has however been something people missed, compared to pie in the sky things like vaccines.
Also compared to masks which are obvious but have been religiously attacked in the West.
> Bill Gates has literally been preparing the last 20 years to make enormous amounts of money on a forced vaccination program
Is this one of those conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing about?
Bill Gates’ foundation has been giving away money for decades. If you think he’s planning to make a bunch of money off “forced vaccination”, you’re stuck in the past — Gates doesn’t care about making more money, he cares about getting the respect of his peer group & broader society. He’s not going to earn money off this, he’s going to earn respect.
That has nothing to do with “forced” vaccination, and everything to do with (the perception of) saving lives otherwise lost to this virus. If he funds a real vaccine, whether forced or not, he’ll accomplish his goal.
Please, leave the shortsighted “greed” conspiracy theories off this site.
[+] [-] teapourer|6 years ago|reply
To repeat: don't take this as a sign that Korea believes it has successfully managed the outbreak.
[+] [-] colmvp|6 years ago|reply
Certainly, a lot of it has to with migrant workers and their living situations, but it also underscores how even when you have things under control, the virus can spread rapidly when your guard is down.
[+] [-] joe_the_user|6 years ago|reply
South Korea has had fewer deaths than other nations, South Korea has a semi-open economy now. What better model for managing the outbreak is there? (The condition of Europe and the US look very dismal) It's kind of strange seeing this claim with no substantiation beside "repeat" apparently staying on the top of HN for a while.
South Korea hasn't entirely averted the danger and is clearly still keeping it in mind. The virus is going to be around for a while and normalizing life is needed and it seems South Korea has to the testing and contact tracing infrastructure needed for this. What is the counter-argument?
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|6 years ago|reply
Meanwhile, the on the street observations in the article are: masks, masks, masks. Masks are cheap and easy. So let's start with masks, masks, masks first while we figure out and ramp up testing and contact tracing.
the first Apple store to reopen outside China had lines snaking out the door as many South Koreans -- almost all wearing masks
At Han River park in Seoul’s Banpo district, families -- also in masks -- were having picnics
including requiring voters to wear masks and disposable plastic gloves while casting their ballots
People are still wearing masks and mind talking face-to-face with strangers
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
Or is that just that the family clusters are good news copy (ugh) and over-represented?
[+] [-] nikofeyn|6 years ago|reply
but they have successfully managed it. it's just that they're still managing it and are not done.
[+] [-] Nokinside|6 years ago|reply
You can get the immunity only two ways 1) enough people have been gone trough the disease or 2) vaccination.
South Korea must use mitigation/supression until they have enough people vaccinated or it flares up again. Complete eradication without immunity is not feasible unless you isolate whole country from the rest of the world permanently.
[+] [-] pcr910303|6 years ago|reply
For people who are interested in current Korea's situation:
There were 18 new cases two days ago, and 8 new cases yesterday. The number of new cases have been consistently falling since April 14th. 'Intense social distancing' was stopped yesterday (April 19th), and the Korean government is planning to drop the 'social distancing' policy on May 5th.
Schools are planned to open on May 6th, and the ban of churches, bars, etc. are expected to be dropped in the following days (probably tomorrow).
The KCDC is saying that to drop the 'social distancing', there should consistently have less than 30 cases (which is true for a week) and cases which infection routes are unknown should be less than 5% of all new cases. (It was about 5%~10% when it was announced, and AFAIK it's now true.)
There's still some anxiety because people started to become dull to the social distancing movement - so people are worrying that new cases might increase.
[+] [-] modernyogihippy|6 years ago|reply
Otherwise, won't there be a new wave of infections when they let 'outsiders' back in from places where the virus is still running rampant?
[+] [-] gdulli|6 years ago|reply
> Korean government is planning to drop the 'social distancing' policy on May 5th.
Are the people divided about whether it was a good idea to wait until new cases got this low before making decisions about moving forward? Or is there very broad support for the kind of discipline it takes to wait until May 5 despite the cases being so low already?
Have people's opinions about the appropriate level of response become politicized? Have the facts and statistics and science of it all become politicized?
[+] [-] pcr910303|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FlorianRappl|6 years ago|reply
But its completely wrong to think they passed it. They also have massive impediments at the moment. Back to normal? Far from it.
[+] [-] collyw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3fe9a03ccd14ca5|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|6 years ago|reply
“South Korea's foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, speaking to the BBC last week, said the key lessons from her country are that it developed testing for the virus even before it had a significant number of cases. "In mid-January, our health authorities quickly conferred with the research institutions here [to develop a test]," Kang said. "And then they shared that result with the pharmaceutical companies, who then produced the reagent [chemical] and the equipment needed for the testing."
[+] [-] tomxor|6 years ago|reply
Comparing absolutes is not very useful so I thought I'd double check this. The difference is obviously less when normalized but the US is still an order of magnitude worse than SK:
[+] [-] lm28469|6 years ago|reply
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore...
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
[+] [-] makomk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|6 years ago|reply
[1]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
[+] [-] ajross|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|6 years ago|reply
One problem with the death of journalism is that no one is even reporting on this.
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grey-area|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] symplee|6 years ago|reply
Shows the following stats:
[+] [-] matwood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CathedralBorrow|6 years ago|reply
For all of MSNBC's faults, their anchors have been repeating testing like a broken record. They even mention how much they sound like a broken record but that testing is simply the most important thing in reopening, and that the US is doing very little of it.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vanderburgt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Benmcdonald__|6 years ago|reply
1 person has died this year from coronavirus in Seoul
Looks to be near the end of the outbreak for Korea
[+] [-] coldcode|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dominotw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|6 years ago|reply
Seegene, a company that makes Covid-19 testing equipment is in Korea. They just needed approval and to ramp up manufacturing. For most countries, like the US, we don't have the manufacturing ability anymore, so we have to go beg and buy tests while we figure how to make again. Seegene alone has been responsible for 80% of the tests in Korea.
[+] [-] socialdemocrat|6 years ago|reply
They where probably better prepared as well. Preparedness varies a lot. In the Nordic region where I am from the Finns have done better than the rest of us because they are a prepper nation. They constantly prepare for the worst.
Finland has enormous bunkers under their cities that can hold the whole population with air filters, water, food stock piles etc. Finland has massive stock piles of medical equipment, even stockpiles of raw materials for making ammunition medication etc.
In many ways I think it has paid for them to not be NATO members. They know they are alone and have to take care of themselves just like in the winter war against the Soviet Union.
In Norway I think we place too much faith in NATO. If it was up to me I would get the hell out and focus on self reliance instead.
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnw_hazor|6 years ago|reply
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-south-korea-scaled-co...
[+] [-] refurb|6 years ago|reply
So they have the know how, and it's just a matter of effort and time to execute.
[+] [-] leesec|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aretas77|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SpicyLemonZest|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LordHumungous|6 years ago|reply
Also, over what timeline are we talking? South Korea has fewer deaths now, will that be the case in two years time?
I've seen a lot of articles lately drawing conclusions from the state of the world as it exists now. But this is a highly dynamic situation. Today's assumptions are next month's fallacies. We need more humility.
[+] [-] neonate|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robotbeat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldng|6 years ago|reply
Edit I don't see why the downvotes. It is easily fact-checkable. Those 65 persons were hospitalized for their symptoms, considered treated and released and about 2 weeks later showed symptoms again.
[+] [-] 3fe9a03ccd14ca5|6 years ago|reply
A theory is that these asymptomatic cases simply had latent virus in their nasal passages (thus testing positive), and not actually be building any antibodies from an infection.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaron695|6 years ago|reply
And public masks, good contact tracking, and they say gloves but hand PPE, like alcohol, also I assume a good isolation system that doesn't scare people but seen no reports on this.
Investing on making testing to be cheap and quick has however been something people missed, compared to pie in the sky things like vaccines.
Also compared to masks which are obvious but have been religiously attacked in the West.
[+] [-] snambi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] narrator|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] zamfi|6 years ago|reply
Is this one of those conspiracy theories I’ve been hearing about?
Bill Gates’ foundation has been giving away money for decades. If you think he’s planning to make a bunch of money off “forced vaccination”, you’re stuck in the past — Gates doesn’t care about making more money, he cares about getting the respect of his peer group & broader society. He’s not going to earn money off this, he’s going to earn respect.
That has nothing to do with “forced” vaccination, and everything to do with (the perception of) saving lives otherwise lost to this virus. If he funds a real vaccine, whether forced or not, he’ll accomplish his goal.
Please, leave the shortsighted “greed” conspiracy theories off this site.