South Korea: how to tackle a pandemic without a lockdown

[Haatu]

Read this article to learn more: 

Coronavirus cases have dropped sharply in South Korea. What’s the secret to its success?

WWW.SCIENCEMAG.ORG

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A scary brush with Middle East respiratory syndrome led the country to set up the world’s most expansive testing program for COVID-19

 

[Haatu]

The other day I wrote about an economic blueprint for Somalia. Tonight I present Korea's excellent infectious disease mitigation strategies. The Koreans learnt from the MERS outbreak a few years ago. Let's hope Somalis can learn from this pandemic to put systems in place for the future.

Key points:

• A centralised coordinated response with regional branches. This was provided by the Korea Centre for Disease Control. 
• Testing, testing, testing. Korea tests 15,000 people a day. They've also set up drive-through testing booths. The ability to also analyse all these results efficiently.
• The ability to manufacture testing kits rapidly in the country. Very important.
• Rigorous contact tracing and quarantining.
• Stratifying positive cases based on severity: the high-risk patients with underlying health conditions are hospitalised, those with mild/moderate symptoms are kept in re-purposed public spaces where they are closely observed and isolated, those with the mildest symptoms allowed to self isolate at home. They receive a call twice a day to ensure they are sticking to their self isolation and to track their condition. This patient stratification prevents hospitals being overwhelmed. Those who recover are released after two negative tests.
• General nationwide social distancing. Large gatherings and events cancelled, the religiously observant advised to pray at home.

So far the above measures seem to be working very well for Korea. It only reported 74 new cases today and the total death rate is 75. All this without needing to resort to draconian lockdowns.

[Old_Observer]

To each according to their capacity.

America could and wanted to copy Korean method, but America has zero capacity to do that.

Koreans are able to test 100,000 person a day and now even more.

America could only test less than 100 a week. More than 200 machines/kits distributed in February in America did not work.

Russia supplied 7 countries and itself with test systems and initial capacity and protective gears. It sent 2.5 million protective gear to China in the beginning.

Korean method maybe most successful, but only 3-4 countries in the world can use it.

America, France, Brazil, India...etc are not among them.