How South Korea Flattened the Curve
Interesting article in the New York Times. Hopefully it is accessible to all of you under their policy of giving free access to Corona Virus articles.
South Korea early on developed many cases in a local sectarian and secretive church. It could easily have become widespread. However they were determined to track down all the cases, and have the laws which permit them to use bank information, phone tracing, etc.to do all this. In other words to treat the virus as the war it is.
A key element was that they immediately developed and mass produced tests. They now produce 100,000 a day. And they get results within hours.
They also developed the drive through testing which separates potential cases from their regular medical system. Their death rate is low. Possibly because their medical system never became overwhelmed. Of course it might also be low because they identified a much larger portion of the population that had the virus.
A key question is will they be able to maintain this system until we get a vaccine. Not many of their people are developing immunity through exposure to the virus. So it is always possible it may get out of control. Once half of more of our population develop immunity through exposure that will slow things down at the cost of many deaths.
I spent about 20 years of my life building and using state of the art data systems for the mental heath boards of the two counties where I worked. I spent a lot of time making them useful to clinicians and clinical managers. So this approach appeals greatly to me.
Much better than shutting down economies and keeping everybody at home.
Of course people who value their privacy may prefer to shut down the economy and stay at home.
UPDATE
Coronavirus Deaths by U.S. State and Country Over Time: Daily Tracking
The New York Times has introduced a new graph based up the death rate, comparing countries by starting the chart at a common point, when the 25th death occurred. Again we find evidence that the course of the epidemic has varied by country with Mainland China, Korea and Japan following different trajectories that Europe and the US.
Thanks, Jack. I was able to access the NYT article. Interesting that the S. Koreans have been able to control the outbreak without tanking their economy. Of course a key element is that they have enough test kits. That may be the lack that hurts us the most. Another thing is the social will; apparently they are not as polarized as we are. About valuing our privacy, who are we kidding? We have none, haven't for a long time, between social media, and corporations selling our information as a commodity.
ReplyDeleteMy husband and I have been wondering for a couple of weeks now why we aren't doing what S. Korea did - most commentary claims that Americans would not permit the invasion of privacy that their contact tracking methods require - similar to what Singapore etc have done. That doesn't explain why they were able to begin testing 10,000/day while we were unable to test more than a few hundred. Same in Germany, and the results are back in a very short time - not days.
ReplyDeleteGermany has a lot of cases (a lot of testing) and relatively few deaths. I am not sure if their contact tracing uses the same methods that S. Korea has used. But they are doing something right.
Why don't we ever learn from others?
So word is now that Trump wants to relax distancing requirements at the end of the month because he thinks the consequences of it are worse than the disease. His talk show friends agree with him. Is there an adult in the house?
ReplyDeleteNo. That job was given to the only man who can stand through The Don's 90-minute "briefings" (pre-empting local new here) every day without changing his expression, which seems to aim at solemn awe.
DeleteIs anyone really surprised that the crisis has exceeded Trump's attention span already? He's still comparing apples to oranges, that is coronavirus to car accidents and flu.
DeleteTexas Lt. governor, Dan Patrick, is on record as saying he thinks a lot of seniors would be willing to die for the economy. St. Paul said that perhaps for a righteous man someone would dare to die. But for the economy?
The irony is that we could have been on the South Korea track of having a partially open economy. But we needed two things to do it; enough tests, and enough of the right kind of masks. Also better case tracking. In WWII we mobilized factories to turn out planes and tanks, but now we can't mobilize test kits and masks?