Reminder: South Korea controlled Covid-19 without a shutdown.

[SunSeeker]

How? Competent national leadership who acted quickly to get testing and targeted quarantines implemented. Trump failed us horrifically with his lies and two months of dithering and reality denial.

South Korea got their first case on Jan. 20, same day as us. South Korea lost only 240 people to date to the virus because they had a competent, able government who took it seriously, immediately mass producing tests as soon as the WHO made the test available to the world on Jan. 17. Because they had readily available testing, they were able to do targeted quarantines and never had to shut their country down.

The death numbers tell how stark the difference is when you have competent leadership. South Korea has one of the lowest death rates in the world at 4.6 per 1 million population. Trump, on the other hand, lied that it was the flu and sat on his stubby orange hands for 2 months, resulting in a U.S. death total to date of 47,681, and one of the worst death rates in the world, at 145.7 per 1 million population. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/



From a March 26 article in NPR:


How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

As of this week, South Korea had just over 9,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, which puts it among the top 10 countries for total cases.

But South Korea has another distinction: Health experts are noting that recently the nation has managed to significantly slow the number of new cases. And the country appears to have reined in the outbreak without some of the strict lockdown strategies deployed elsewhere in the world.

"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."

So when members of a religious sect in Daegu started getting sick in February, South Korea was able to rapidly confirm that it was COVID-19.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/26/821688981/how-south-korea-reigned-in-the-outbreak-without-shutting-everything-down

[tableturner]

1. K and R......

[crickets]

2. We need more tests, argh. K&R for visibility.

[SouthernCal_Dem]

3. This!

Our economy is shut down and millions are unemployed because of incompetent leadership in the White House.

No other reason!

[gratuitous]

8. Lack of leadership in the U.S. for sure

Trump has been all over the map and back, from "It's a hoax," "It'll go away like magic" to "Try these magic beans, they probably won't kill you!" Steady, consistent leadership with clear and concise messaging, and what do you know? People get it! They make those small personal sacrifices for the greater good for everyone.

Instead, the public has gotten contradictory statements out of this administration. Competent people who know what they're doing have been cashiered. Well-connected ignorant cronies are put in charge of things they don't know anything about. Half measures and half-assed measures are trotted out, then abandoned. Confusion reigns, and the stench of grift wafts off of every pronouncement from the White House. Result: Thousands and thousands of dead bodies, billions of dollars wasted, and an inordinate amount of time is spent on confused and ignorant knuckleheads frightened down to their toenails and massing in the streets, paving the way for the next wave of infections to spread.

Categorical, utter, catastrophic incompetence.

[Igel]

4. A couple of points for the RCP bit.

1. S. Korea's government did not manufacture the kits.

2. S. Korea's government asked private business to produce kits, and within 2 weeks had two kits approved, heading into mass production, using readily available technology and production techniques. Because the businesses produced them given what they know about the technology readily available. (It helped greatly that business, government, and academia all had the same tech.)

3. It was not the WHO kits that they produced.

But notice the timeline. S. Korea assumed China was lying out of its ass. It had already started doing intensive screening of anybody from Wuhan (and then Hubei province). Not as fast as Taiwan, which started this *before* the Chinese formally announced the novel virus, before the genome was (re)published, and before it was (again) identified as a coronavirus. When China was still saying that there was evidence of possible human-to-human transmission but that it apparently required close contact and extended exposure, they'd been working on their procedures for a week.

We make a big deal--"the Chinese said it was possible." Better, "the Chinese said it was possible, but rare." Less affirming that something was generally true, more restricting it to few cases. When they had good cause to know things in December, but even at higher echelons of power there was still a reluctance to say it. The rush of power emanating from a central authority often produces a current that keeps the truth from heading up stream.

S. Korea had the MERS outbreak a few years back as training. And were burned with Chinese "mask wearing" to hide the true face of the H1N1 and SARS outbreaks.

Then there's the culture and the other means used. I've already seen official statements from advocacy groups wanting all kinds of restrictions and oversight on the kinds of things that might be necessary for good contact tracing, the kinds of things Taiwan and S. Korea both did--we must protect privacy. As another pointed out yesterday, "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" aren't in the Constitution. I guess privacy is.

[Cha]

5. Excellent Reminder that needs to keep being

reminded.. over and over again!

Mahalo, SunSeeker~

[uponit7771]

6. K&R, "In mid-January ... [to develop test]"

[miyazaki]

7. kick

[Zing Zing Zingbah]

9. Yeah, that sounds a lot smarter

We've got a moron in charge so we can't expect smart decisions.

[NickB79]

10. They used phone apps to track every citizen via GPS

And compiled it into a massive database to contact trace.

Go ahead and tell me you'd be OK with that in the US, given who's currently in the White House.

[SunSeeker]

11. Yes, I'm fine with anonymous tracing, and not losing 50k people and destroying our economy.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/18/21224178/covid-19-tech-tracking-phones-china-singapore-taiwan-korea-google-apple-contact-tracing-digital

[NickB79]

12. People were fine with the Patriot Act as well

Good intentions can easily be twisted by bad people.

[SunSeeker]

13. Trump is killing us already. We need Biden elected on Nov. 3.

Trump will never do contact tracing. I trust Biden would do it properly and preserve anonymity. We need Biden elected if we expect to come out of this disaster.

[JI7]

15. it's already easy to track people

[rictofen]

17. But we don't publicize the data like South Korea did

SK is the country most have chosen as the shining example to follow, but the more unpalatable methods such nations have employed are usually omitted.

----

"In central city of Daejeon, more than 1 million phones received an alert saying a virus carrier visited “Magic Coin Karaoke in Jayang-dong at midnight on Feb. 20.”

In Cheonan, a text alert to residents showed that an infected person visited “Imperial Foot Massage at 13:46 on Feb. 24.”

The digital diaries of infected people grew to cover all kinds of places: bars, karaoke clubs and short-stay “love hotels.”

One woman, who asked to be identified only with her surname Seo out of privacy concerns, said she has stopped going to a bar popular with gay women."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/coronavirus-south-korea-tracking-apps/2020/03/13/2bed568e-5fac-11ea-ac50-18701e14e06d_story.html

I don't want any administration with that power, let alone Trump's.

[blitzen]

14. Yes, true--but the details of the piece show that they in effect did what we are calling a shutdown.

[SunSeeker]

16. Wrong. They kept their factories, restaurants and shopping malls open.

From the NPR article:

The other thing that South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore have in common is that they've been able to keep most factories, shopping malls and restaurants open. 

What we are calling a shutdown is MUCH more than what South Korea limited. CA, NY and other states had to not only close down schools, but even more devastating for the local economies, they had to shut down sit-down restaurants and all "non-essential businesses." The shutdown of restaurants has be devastating to my little beach town here in CA. Restaurants are the main employers.

[blitzen]

18. Sorry, I confused this story with one that came out today on Hong Kong...

https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-04-22/how-hong-kong-flattened-the-curve-without-total-lockdown

They closed schools, limited gatherings to four people, regulated seating in restaurants, closed bars, gyms, cinemas, etc.