How South Korea Reined In The Outbreak Without Shutting Everything Down

Korea's population followed strict quarantine, and they had testing at a massive scale, matched only by China to this day.

S. Korea wasted no time and the population has shown great ability to cooperate with the state to control the outbreak.

It’s too late for the rest of us. Extreme measures are now the only option.

So have Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia (440 million people).

They've all had fewer cases than Luxembourg so far.

I've yet to see a good explanation for it, other than maybe the premise about seasonal temps and humidity (northern vs southern hemisphere). There's no evidence they're massively lying about their numbers (which would show up in the form of a demolished hospital system and thousands dead of pneumonia). Vietnam has also done incredibly well overall, showing no indications of being crushed by cases, despite their proximity to China.

Mexico is also not being crushed at all by the virus, despite being right next to the US as Vietnam is right next to China. Mexico shares enormous trade and traffic with the US. They should be buried in pneumonia cases given their overall context (population size, economy, testing rate, healthcare system). They have just over half the cases of Finland (obviously Mexico isn't testing at a high rate, I'm sure it's more than just 600). If many thousands of people were dying of Covid in Mexico right now, it would be showing up blatantly. Latin America's case load has largely been low vs population sizes (with only a few exceptions), as with the rest of the southern hemisphere. Mexico is technically northern hemisphere, and I wonder if they don't have some of the southern hemisphere benefit (as perhaps India does), limiting the rate of infection vs nations that are further north. And will that flip at all in the coming months.

https://i.imgur.com/EH8OkTd.png

It'd be very interesting to see a comparison of avg temps and humidity among nations most affected (or least) during the outbreak timeframe. Including looking at locations such as Italy, France, Germany, Spain, NYC, Texas, Southern California, Seattle, South Korea, parts of Mexico, Thailand, and so on.

Basically, due to seasonal temps and humidity, is South Korea's task made far easier than Italy's task? Does that considerably alter the infectiousness of SARS-CoV-2 in South Korea vs Italy? Is their equation half the effort they've put in (and credit on that), and half good luck of location. Mexico sure as hell isn't avoiding being overrun by it due to maximum testing.

I spent many hours last night doing a deep dive on the latest research on the impact of humidity on viruses, infectiousness and the respiratory system. It's fascinating stuff.

They took proactive measurements when the rest of the world was still looking at how things would develop.

Making tests well before they had their first case.

When my country got its first cases they were still saying it isn't that contagious and everything is fine.

The thing is, South Korea (and many other Asian countries cited as having handled COVID19 relatively well, such as Taiwan, HK, Singapore, Japan) have all learned from the 2003 SARS epidemic and others, while the Western countries did not. This is not just in terms of politics/preparation to disasters, but also in the civilization - in Asia even the most radical and extreme measures are accepted by the population as everyone there knows what a pandemic can cause, while in Germany people are having "corona parties" and there have been numerous incidents of people spitting or coughing at other people.

Additionally, in many Western countries healthcare systems have been wrecked by neoliberalism profit-first ideology (Germany, UK), by austerity following the 2008 financial crisis (Italy, Spain, Greece) or by decades of incompetency (USA), combined with the end of stockpiling of critical assets such as face masks, gloves and other PPE after the end of the Cold War.

The key point of "shutting down" is to avoid overloading the healthcare systems, or at least to try to limit the overloading.