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Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

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Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#91

Post by pcr910303 »

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.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#92

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

collyw wrote: post #77
nradov wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This video has a good explanation of why the Spanish policy is ineffective. https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-joh...

I didn't watch it, but a couple of the bullet points look pretty untrustworthy. Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people. It's a fair bit nastier, certainly in some cases, or the hospitals wouldn't be full. The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1% How can we be sure until we have widespread testing? At least 50% of the population o…

We won't be sure of such statistics whether or not we have widespread testing. Even for pandemics in the past, we just don't know how many people caught them, not even a single significant digit. The best we can do is make reasoned guesses based on the available evidence.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#93

Post by zzzcpan »

rhino369 wrote: post #75
collyw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no evidentiary basis for the extreme lock-down Spain is using. While this disease is pretty contagious, you are pretty unlikely to get it walking around outside or going for a run. Especially if everyone is wearing a mask. It's possible you could catch it by running through a cloud of an infected persons breath, but the risk is low enough that we shouldn't ban outside activities. The vast, vast majority of i…

This is an ancient understanding though, it ignores aerosol transmission. But you are still correct that outside is safe, there is absolutely no need to restrict it at all, it's confined poorly ventilated spaces that are a problem, like almost any building, cars, buses, planes, where the virus can concentrate in the air and close range contact isn't even needed, just breathing such air is bad enough. Wearing a mask is the only thing that helps to not get infected in such situations, but doesn't actually help much when infected people are wearing them, they still contaminate the air with aerosol.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#94

Post by matwood »

BurningFrog wrote: post #79

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.

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.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#95

Post by tomxor »

> 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:

  USA:
  700e3 / 328.2e6 * 100 = 0.213%

  SK:
  10e3 / 51.64e6 * 100 = 0.019%

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#96

Post by modernyogihippy »

pcr910303 wrote: post #91

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 a…

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?

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#97

Post by pcr910303 »

pcr910303 wrote: post #91

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 a…

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).

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#98

Post by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 »

andybak wrote: post #73
killIdeas wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current narrative is that anyone who thinks this quarentine is poorly managed is a Trump supporter. This couldn't be further from the truth. They have made it political.

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??

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#99

Post by yfzhou »

daveFNbuck wrote: post #55
Nokinside wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't have to completely isolate the country from the world. You just have to do testing and quarantining to ensure that infectious people and things aren't entering the country.

China has been doing mandatory 14-day hotel quarantine for all foreign arrivals like this: https://twitter.com/nishantsharma87/status/12424610259510845...

However, the latest cluster in Heilongjiang involved an asymptomatic student returned from USA, completed 14 day quarantine, tested negative before and after, but still went on to infect her family and neighbors who infected more at the hospital. Total confirmed cases in this cluster is ~50 right now.

Most of the spread in this case happened because of negligence in the hospital thinking coronavirus is eradicated there so they didn’t take precautions. Coastal cities like Shanghai are taking good measures so there hasn’t been a problem despite it being where most international flights land and basically 100% back to work for over a month now. The biggest danger is people becoming tired of wearing masks and avoiding gatherings over time.

Re: Seoul's full cafes, Apple store lines show mass testing success

#100

Post by _ph_ »

Reason077 wrote: post #68
WillPostForFood wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> “masks, masks, masks.” Exactly. I wonder how many lives could have been saved if we (western/European countries) didn’t have such an aversion to wearing face masks, even in a time of pandemic?

Well, first of all, there were no masks to wear. Not even enough to properly equip all medical personal. But yes, if people would wear masks whenever there is the risk that they are sick, be it Covid-19, the flu or just a cold, it would be beneficial.
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