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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.
So they have the know how, and it's just a matter of effort and time to execute.
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Can you summarize or link to the time in the video where it is addressed?
I recommend watching the whole video, as it is by far the clearest argument in favor of the "herd immunity" approach I've seen. The problem with the approach is that it assumes several things that, shall we say, there is not yet evidence for. 1. The disease is relatively mild, certainly less than an order of magnitude more fatal than influenza. 2. It is possible to protect older people and other vulnerable population…
This should not be called “reinfection” (even though there are a bunch of sloppy media headlines calling it that) but rather “poor test sensitivity during the last stages of the infection”.
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...
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? [1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
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.
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No, because they test people regularly and do accurate contact tracing. Thanks to a favourable regulatory environment and a profusion of capable people, South Korea scaled up testing and tracing capacity very rapidly. Furthermore, they were socially prepared to do the basic social distancing. Also, Taiwan has done an excellent job, and they didn't need to perform nearly as many tests. AFAIK there hasn't been a single…
Taiwan also has a lot of preventative measures, i.e. mandatory mask usage in mass transit systems, government issued masks and mask rationing system, automated temperature checks at various public spaces, mask usage in schools, plastic dividers at restaurants... on top of that they have a very sophisticated scalable method of tracking people who have the virus and ensuring that they are abiding by quarantine rules vi…
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Per capita is all that matters.
Sure. On a per capita basis the US is ahead of SK. To reach Germany levels the US will need 8M+ tests. That’s a large percentage of all tests that have already been done worldwide. Unfortunately a large country like the US (similar to countries like China and India) is going to run into production/technology constraints. The US dropped many balls and started late with ramping testing in particular, but now the rampin…
A large country has a lot of people to test, but also a lot of people to manufacture and perform the tests. So that argument doesn't work for me. Especially when we're talking about the richest country in the world.
Now, if the test making and executing is done by a single centralized organization, it does make some sense. Which is why that way of doing things is an anti-pattern.
Meanwhile, the US still has very little testing capacity, with no signs of if and when that will change. One problem with the death of journalism is that no one is even reporting on this.
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Who's "they"? From an outside perspective (UK) everyone seems to be making it political - Trump especially so.
The coordinated mainstream media. Again, the narrative is if you think the US media is partisan you’re a Trump supporter. The entire US media ecosystem is owned by only 6 companies. It used to be hip to distrust the media but now it makes you a Trump supporter or conspiracy theorist??
Meanwhile, the US still has very little testing capacity, with no signs of if and when that will change. One problem with the death of journalism is that no one is even reporting on this.
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.
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It's entirely possible I have missed something, and I'd love some links! I'm especially looking for reporting on why it's so slow, what the bottlenecks are, and who's responsible. Even if there is some good reporting out there, I think this should me one of the main news items in a healthy society. I have seen reporting on the bungling of the initial testing rollout, like this one: https://www.washingtonpost.com/inve…
This article for example was on the CNN front page, explaining that the major bottlenecks are test swabs and the required reagents and describing a specific FDA action which the governor of Ohio thinks would solve his problems. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/19/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/...
That is better than I've seen.
I'm still missing anything beyond summarizing what officials have said.
The Ohio Governor blaming FDA regulations is the closest to an analysis in there.
Meanwhile, the US still has very little testing capacity, with no signs of if and when that will change. One problem with the death of journalism is that no one is even reporting on this.
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.