Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 287 posts

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#261

Post by magduf »

theseadroid wrote: post #184
billfruit wrote: post #157

Last few days though, more numbers are being reported of new infections in both China and South Korea. Yesterday more than 100+ in SK I think.

For China many Chinese emigrants are returning home with the virus with them. as they don't trust their local healthcare systems. One example: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/biogen-parts-way-employe...

Well she's probably right not to trust the American healthcare system. It was pretty bad before, and it's going to be a completely dysfunctional disaster pretty soon.

Meanwhile, China is able to build an emergency pandemic hospital in 10 days.

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#262

Post by supdatecron »

svara wrote: post #173
supdatecron wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a study that showed cotton masks can actually be worse. A medical person showed me the other day, I’ll have to ask for the link

Probably the MacIntyre et al. paper. It's being misinterpreted everywhere in this very misleading fashion. See this blog MacIntyre wrote to clarify this: https://iser.med.unsw.edu.au/blog/impact-ppe-shortages-healt... People misrepresenting this study are doing tremendous harm, it has to stop.

Thank you for sharing this updated clarification. I just shared it with that medical professional who showed me the original. Hoping to spread this clarification

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#263

Post by dirtyid »

summerlight wrote: post #249
dirtyid wrote: post #66

South Korea is basically an island, conducted serendipitous did large scale pandemic drill in December, has a compliant population with mandatory civil service and memory of recent authoritarian government, can mobilize techno-authoritarian surveillance. My question is, what is happening in Japan? Except wide spread mask usage, they have systemic undertesting at 1/6 capacity, no social distance measures, nothing shut…

> South Korea is basically an island, conducted serendipitous did large scale pandemic drill in December, has a compliant population with mandatory civil service and memory of recent authoritarian government, can mobilize techno-authoritarian surveillance. And they didn't even try to shutdown churches, bars and clubs, while churches consistently have been the largest sources of mass infection. And your may also want…

I didn't say they were authoritarian government but a large segment of SK population grew up under SK dictatorship which has implications on compliance. Same with Taiwan, Singapore is still single party dictatorship etc. I'm well aware of the domestic SK reaction (negative) around alleged mishandling of the response which is just extra incentive to manipulate test data. Cho Kuk was 6 months ago. Record high unemployment since GFC. Nothing about this administration suggest it's not above fixing stats on top of overall high testing rate especially with the high stakes of underperforming. Almost every SK president has been mired in corruption scandals, many were imprisoned for shady dealings. Why would this be any different?

Yeah, they could have found a working formula, but they could also be lying like other first world countries that we know are under reporting deaths via recatorigzation of likely covid deaths to other deaths to depress the impact. SK corruption and transparency index is comparable to France and Italy who already acknowledged doing so. Add the geopolitical layer of western media trying to grasp at any alternative strategy that doesn't involve Chinese style lockdown. Very few reports even mentions SK contact tracing is closer to Chinese techno-authoritarian techniques than not, which ultimately makes SK response not a useful model for these countries until they get desperate. Which is my main point, media is fixating on SK testing and contact tracing when latter is not possible in many first world countries.

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#264

Post by koonsolo »

Donald wrote: post #211
koonsolo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it needs to be a 'proper' mask. Yesterday I was in a shop and saw 2 different people with a scarf over their mouth. You would think this is no problem, but they both had to keep this scarf up with their hands... . Seems like the most effective way to spread and receive germs. Govermnent needs to be clear what the protocol is.

Even cloth filters out 70% of respiratory virus particles. The notion that only a properly fitted N95 mask is effective is ridiculous and is probably costing lives.

Sure, but if you inhale 30% of that from your hand into your mouth, and exhale 30% to your hand, it loses more than just not touching your face.

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#265

Post by bitexploder »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #256
bitexploder wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For our use, faulty KN95 masks are better than nothing. Maybe they suck but it’s better than nothing and probably better than home made masks. You have to shop around and find reputable sellers that have been in business a while to mitigate risks as much as possible. I trust Aliexpress slightly less than Amazon these days which says a lot. Amazon used to have my unquestioning trust. Now I barely use them in favor of…

Are they? It's unclear whether KN95 masks are better than a piece of fitted fabric around your mouth and nose. That's the trouble with masks; we don't know what works and what doesn't.

I wi work on the assumption that it is at least as good with a probability to be better. We know how this virus is transmitted and what is needed to filter it, it’s just a particle. We have strong evidence from the healthcare community that these masks keep workers COVID-19 free. They definitely work on other viruses of a similar size...

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#266

Post by ksec »

covingkj wrote: post #198
tekkk wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confusing "masks" as "surgical masks" aka. N95. He is meaning just the regular masks with no filtering whatsoever, that are very easy to manufacture. Hell you can even make them yourself. The N95 however, are quite difficult to build and require specialized machines to manufacture the filtering part, somebody linked a good article to it a couple days ago. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/16/8…

To be clear, surgical masks and N95 masks are different things. Both are in short supply in the US.

And the trillions of loss in economy could have been much lower if everyone wear a mask ( Surgical or not ) and kept business opening. It will also greatly flatten the curve in public health services, while buying time to find a vaccine or improve health services capacity.

There is no reason why Mask's supply problem could not be solved when you are looking at a comparatively speaking trillion of dollars package not to save the economy, but barely holding it up so it doesn't fall.

I am still baffled at the insistence that mask are useless, surgical or not. When there are ample of evidence to suggest it is the best tool to help and stop virus from spreading.

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#267

Post by jmalicki »

tekkk wrote: post #253
covingkj wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, surgical masks and N95 masks are different things. Both are in short supply in the US.

Ahh, yes I was a bit confused on the terminology. So surgical masks are just masks with some filtering capability but without a respirator. And N95 is a respirator, which is different from mask as it protects the wearer better from airborne particles?

This 3M product brochure explains it more clearly than anything else I've seen.

https://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/1794572O/surgical-n95-vs...

Surgical masks: 1. keep the wearer from infecting the patient 2. keep fluid spray (e.g. bleeding) from getting in the face

N95 respirators are meant to protect the wearer from airborne particles, which surgical masks don't really do at all, since they don't form a seal and air and particles still go around the mask into the mouth. Many N95 masks have an ubobstructed one-way output valve for easier breathing that will not protect the patient from the wearer.

And as it mentions, surgical N95 masks (the blue respirators many medical professionals wear in news photos lately) do both.

* Edit: Another 3M brochure shows that many of their non-N95 masks are also tested for filtration efficiency, even though not certified by NIOSH.

http://multimedia.3m.com/mws/media/312703O/masks-and-respira...

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#268

Post by LZ_Khan »

mcsb4 wrote: post #21

Again another article that doesn't even mention the use of masks and hand sanitizer. The cost of the epidemic now goes into the trillions, self-made cotton masks are cheap compared to the economic damage. They can be disinfected in boiling water and if everybody uses them they will help to stop the spreading of the virus. In all the countries mentioned in the article people wear masks when in public, often just again…

I genuinely wonder if the use of masks is the biggest factor in stopping the transmission. When I went to Asia mask wearing was common everyday as a protection against transmission/pollution. It was almost even a fashion item. But here in the US, when the outbreak happened and I went grocery shopping with a mask I was stared at and given fearful looks as if I had the virus already.

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#269

Post by adventured »

fiftyfifty wrote: post #199
simonsarris wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have wondered that for a while, especially since countries like Malaysia had outbreaks long before Italy. Originally I thought: https://simonsarris.com/sunlight (note: data last updated March 16) But there are several axes that could matter just as much as quarantine/lockdowns: Humidity, sunlight (as proxy for vitamin D levels, or simply UV), pollution (which also affects sunlight), median age (47 in Italy, 30 in M…

I'm really starting to think there might be something to this. In the US, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop in places like California, Texas and Florida and the days keep going by and we are not seeing anything like the death toll New York is having. California had some of the very first cases in the US and took in at least one cruise ship of infected people. Florida's governor has been openly defiant against…

There is something to it, I just don't know why nobody is talking about it much. It's pretty painfully obvious if you start digging into the data, researching the outbreak map, and looking at the temps & humidity levels in the areas. SARS-CoV-2 appears to more or less be obeying what influenza does when it comes to seasons, temps, and humidity (along with perhaps sunsine / vitamin D as a factor).

NYC should be cranking humidifiers, pushing humidity up to 50% in every space where people exist (except hospitals). It'll dramatically slow the infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 imo. Super low human space humidity is the best friend of a respiratory virus.

Why aren't San Antonio and Houston buried in cases? Same reason Mexico and Los Angeles are not (relatively speaking, and especially compared to eg NYC).

Las Vegas should be buried in cases, they have tons of international traffic, a zillion opportunities for the virus to be transited around, spread to casino workers and everywhere. Their ICUs should be overflowing to an epic degree. Las Vegas has an inverted humidity map, peak humidity there is November to March, and avg high temps stay up near 55 to 60 degrees (influenza at least hates temps over ~60-65+ F).

How about Santa Fe or Phoenix? Super low case loads, as with Houston and Austin and other similar locations.

Florida isn't seeing a particularly bad outbreak in its cities.

Albuquerque and Phoenix have inverted humidity seasons, their peak humidity times are roughly October/Nov to March.

Wuhan's low sunshine season is November to March. Temps are often well below 50 degrees during that period (and essentially never get to 65+), not high enough to interfere much with influenza or probably SARS-CoV-2. It gets cold enough during flu season there to require persistent indoor heating, which dries everything out, lowering indoor humidity levels dramatically, amplifying potential infectiousness.

Re: How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

#270

Post by tooltalk »

robocat wrote: post #7

Another effing article that completely ignores Taiwan... I’m no taiwanophile, but why is it that a first-world democracy with a successful strategy against Covid is being completely ignored by media? https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689 Taiwan has huge flows of Chinese people, yet no outbreak. Maybe it’s a good thing they are not recognised by the WHO?

Sure, what about Taiwan? Is there anything that Taiwan did which was significantly different from what South Korea or Singapore did to prevent the wide spread of the virus?
Post reply on HN