How South Korea Successfully Battled COVID-19 While the U.S. Didn’t
"To link - How Kushner’s Volunteer Force Led a Fumbling Hunt for Medical Supplies"
Though 6 weeks old, March 30, this article helps to put the South Korea v America response in some context.
IMAGE Experts say South Korea introduced testing and other measures more quickly and efficiently than the United States in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
*The United States is reporting 15 times more confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths than South Korea despite having only about six times the population.
*Experts say the disparity is due to South Korea ramping up testing more quickly and implementing preventive measures, such as school closures, earlier.
*South Korea is making tentative plans to reopen some public facilities next week while the United States is expected to keep social distancing mandates in place for at least another month.
In the more than 2 months since then, South Korea has reduced its rate of new daily cases to one-tenth of its peak while the United States likely won’t see that peak for weeks.
South Korea is also tentatively planning to re-open some public facilities as early as next week.
The United States, on the other hand, is likely to have social distancing measures until at least the end of April.
The reasons for the disparity in the two countries’ outcomes have to do with more than just size, experts say.
It has more to do with the United States missing a critical window to ramp up testing and implement precautionary procedures to get on top of the virus.
The United States has more than six times the population of South Korea, but it’s reporting more than 15 times the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths.
As of Sunday, the United States was listed .. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html .. as having more than 150,000 known COVID-19 cases and more than 2,400 deaths.
As of today, March 30, South Korea is listed as having 9,661 cases and 158 deaths.
Cities across the country are locked down, a last-ditch step that South Korea was able to avoid.
Experts say things might be different in the United States if the country had taken earlier actions — about a month or two ago — closer to what South Korea did.
Examining this alternate reality might also shed light on where the United States can go from here and whether at least parts of the country can still learn from and catch up with South Korea.
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Like the man at the Seattle clinic, she had arrived from Wuhan, where she lived. She was taken to a hospital, where she also tested positive for COVID-19.
- [ INSERT: Trump’s cascading coronavirus failures laid out in devastating timeline [...] In 2018, he let the pandemic-preparedness office in the National Security Council simply dissolve, and followed up with budget cuts to HHS and CDC this year. That team’s job was to follow a pandemic playbook written after global leaders fumbled their response to Ebola in 2014. P - Trump was briefed on the playbook’s existence in his first year – had he listened, the government would’ve started getting equipment to doctors two months ago. P - The initial outbreak of the coronavirus began in Wuhan, China, in December, 2019. By mid-January, 2020, the White House had intelligence reports that warned of a likely pandemic. P - On January 18th, HHS Secretary Azar spoke with Trump to emphasize the threat of the virus just as US Diplomats were being evacuated from Wuhan. P - Two days later, the virus was confirmed in both the US and South Korea. That week, South Korean officials immediately drafted medical companies to develop test kits for mass production. The WHO declared a global health emergency. But Trump … did nothing. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=155047178 ] -
Late January: Tests come online
On January 27, after four confirmed cases of COVID-19, South Korean health officials met with medical companies.
In early February, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a coronavirus test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“We bought ourselves some precious time early on when we closed travel to and from China. That was very important because we reduced introduction. So, we were really in excellent shape at that time,” Dr. William Schaffner .. https://www.vumc.org/health-policy/person/william-schaffner-md , an infectious disease expert at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee, told Healthline.
Italy Banned Flights From China Before America - It Didn’t Work Speaking to the nation last night, U.S. President Donald Trump said a ban on Europeans entering the United States is necessary because Europe hadn’t banned flights from China early as the U.S. had done. P - “The European Union failed to take the same precautions and restrict travel from China and other hot spots as a result a large number of new clusters were seeded by travellers from Europe,” he said. P - But virtually every part of this statement is untrue. P - Italy imposed a ban on flights from China on 31 January, immediately after a Chinese couple in Rome tested positive for the virus. The U.S. began to restrict flights from China four days later. But while Italy enacted a full ban, the U.S. policy was only a restriction, with wide exemptions. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=154799813 -
“But we were hampered shortly thereafter because our capacity to test was so curtailed, both on the public and private side,” Schaffner added. “So we didn’t know how widespread the virus was in our country because there wasn’t testing.”
Late February: The window passes
It wasn’t until late February that new kits were distributed by the CDC and the FDA loosened regulations to allow hospitals and labs to use their own coronavirus tests on patients.
“At that point (of community spread), we couldn’t test widely to see how widely the coronavirus had penetrated into the U.S.,” Schaffner said. “That gave the virus a running start.”
On February 28, President Trump told Americans that the coronavirus is “going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
- [ One other tiny testing fact. Is Donald Trump Criminally Responsible for Coronavirus Deaths? [...] Never forget: South Korea and the United States had their first confirmed COVID-19 case on the same day back in January. South Korea took the threat seriously and by the start of March had tested 100,000 people for the virus. The United States under Trump didn’t take it seriously and had tested just 1,000 people by the start of March. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=155247605 ] -
In fact, South Korea was testing more than 10,000 people each day, including in drive-thru testing sites. In one day, from 4 p.m. Feb. 28 to 4 p.m. Feb. 29, 12,888 people were tested in South Korea, four times the number the U.S. had tested over the previous month and a half.
Experts say this was the critical window that defined the countries’ divergent responses.
“This would have been the time to test widely,” Schaffner said. “But we simply didn’t have the capacity at that time.
South Korea was testing before community spread was even confirmed to be occurring in the country, Schaffner noted.
“What they decided was a combination of widespread testing along with follow-up of all positives,” he said. “As a consequence, they were able to find infections and reduce or even abort widespread transmission.”
Due to these measures and their proactive “test and trace” strategy, South Korea avoided having to implement the sort of mandatory lockdowns implemented in places such as Wuhan, Italy, and now many urban areas in the United States.
Five days later, on March 3, the number of new cases identified each day in South Korea peaked at 851. The United States had identified 118 cases total.
On March 18, the United States officially passed South Korea’s total number of cases.
That was after a one-day jump of 2,853 new confirmed cases. South Korea’s total jumped by 93 new cases that day.
It wasn’t until March 25 that the United States finally caught up .. https://covidtracking.com/us-daily/ .. with South Korea in terms of raw number of tests conducted.
By that time, the death rate in the United States had already surpassed that of South Korea — people in the U.S. had died from COVID-19 versus in South Korea.
“[South Korea] does provide a counterfactual example of what could have happened if we had tested early and, more importantly, acted on that information,” Dr. Thomas Tsai .. https://scholar.harvard.edu/ttsai/home , MPH, who has helped build models around healthcare system capacity in the United States at Harvard’s Global Health Institute, told Healthline. “We stayed on the sidelines watching the Diamond Princess cruise ship .. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e3.htm .. and the Seattle outbreak, and most of the states and federal government did nothing.”
“I think the scenario could have looked very different if we had more testing earlier,” Tsai added.
She said that was because the federal government has “transformed the testing process.”
However, the over 830,000 tests .. https://covidtracking.com/us-daily/ .. that had been done in the United States as of Monday morning works out to about 1 in 400 people in the United States.
South Korea had tested 1 in 130 people as of Monday morning.
“We’re still at a much smaller number proportionally. The time to rest on our laurels is not today,” Tsai said last week. “We’re very much still in the very early days.”
Because of the “running start” the virus got in the United States “we’ve been playing catch-up in defining where the virus is, in terms of hot spots, cold spots, warming spots,” Schaffner said. “We know we have a big hot spot in New York and a bunch of warm spots, and the rest of the country is warming up.”
South Korea was “able to put a halter on this horse and rein it in… but we weren’t able to get the halter on — and didn’t know where it was running,” he said.
[WHILE South Korea tested Trump tweeted, called it a hoax and said it would just go away. The "Chosen One" didn't get his miracle.]
Schaffner noted that a better goal for the United States might be to try to catch up with where China has been in terms of impacts rather than South Korea at this point.
Even there, “I don’t think we can get quite as low as China because we weren’t as comprehensive at introducing social distancing.”
Schaffner does think the current distancing will reduce transmission and provide a benefit, but he notes that those benefits will likely be uneven across such a large country.
New York and other “warm spots” may be tough but, “I think we can avoid Italy over much of this country.”
“For those states who are likely days or a few weeks behind (New York City), they should learn the same message we didn’t learn from South Korea earlier,” Tsai said.
There’s hope there.
“You can’t look at the numbers and throw your hands up,” Tsai said. “Destiny is not written in stone. Every single day we have the agency to change that growth curve” of infection and hospitalization rates.
Late 2020: Preparing for the next one
In a way, the timeline of South Korea’s fight against coronavirus began in the late summer of 2015.
The government was criticized for a slow response and that outcry has been widely seen as the cause for regulations and actions that allowed for such a rapid response to this new coronavirus.
In that sense, perhaps this is just the start of the U.S. timeline in the fight against the next novel coronavirus or other health crisis.
Bright's ouster shines light on months of HHS turmoil [...] Amid the back-and-forth of allegations, one clear picture has emerged: that of a top government scientist repeatedly clashing with his politically appointed leaders, including his direct superior Dr. Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. That feud worsened in recent months as BARDA and Kadlec's division worked on everything from the development of vaccines and therapeutics to the supplies of medical equipment and personal protective equipment for hospital workers. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/23/politics/rick-bright-health-and-human-services-coronavirus/index.html [...] Damn. Yet another one! Trump Moves to Replace Watchdog Who Identified Critical Medical Shortages [...] The White House waited until after business hours to announce the nomination of a new inspector general for the department who, if confirmed, would take over for Christi A. Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general who was publicly assailed by the president at a news briefing three weeks ago. [...] https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=155432387
How Kushner’s Volunteer Force Led a Fumbling Hunt for Medical Supplies [...] When Tana Goertz, the former “Apprentice” contestant who now runs Women For Trump, wrote in with a lead for N95 masks, it circulated among top Trump appointees at three federal agencies — including Mr. Trump’s top public health preparedness official, Robert Kadlec. Ms. Goertz did not reply to messages seeking comment. P - In contrast, Dr. Hendricks’s messages sometimes went unanswered and were passed from person to person, even though he provided the codes and filled out the forms the government required, and sent a picture of the masks to Ms. Baitel to prove that they were real. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=155457002 https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=155478781
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