Going a step beyond the info in the blog post, there's a documentary on Youtube showing how in S. Korea, there are apps to see the paths of corona patients so you can avoid those areas:
My opinion is those apps work because S. Korea remembers SARS-1 (2002/2003), and people there are cooperative. Also, if you do full contact tracing early enough, there aren't an overwhelming number of patients like NY.
S. Korea is the only country that literally "flattened the curve." See unbelievably flat graph @6:50 in link above.
(S. Korea had the same problem as Toronto with SARS-1, where the hospital doctors and nurses were wiped out by the first few cases. In S. Korea, it was the first SARS-1 patient wandering around town like a cruise missile to several doctors and hospitals that spread the disease, as nobody identified the magnitude of the problem.)
> And how will things work with an orderly supermarket queue, where law-abiding people stand patiently six feet apart?
In the SF Bay Area, here's how social distancing works at grocery stores:
1) one entrance/exit with security guards at the door
2) queue outside with shoppers 6' apart
3) only 50 people allowed in at one time, but distance is not enforced in the store except 6' in checkout lanes. However, American grocery stores are large, so the spirit is being followed. Recently, I've seen saran wrap over POS terminals. Bank ATMs also need that prophylactic. :)
4) shoppers are responsible for washing their carts and hands, which is a gap.
Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong all basically avoided the problem up front.
They basically don't even show up on graphs that show positive test counts for other countries.
I've had people argue that this is containment rather than flattening the curve, but I think it's both, it's containment, which is roughly the limit condition for flattening the curve.
Now they are showing us the future, with new outbreaks showing up.
> I've had people argue that this is containment
> rather than flattening the curve, but I think it's
> both, it's containment, which is roughly
> the limit condition for flattening the curve.
Singapore cases are rising, but primarily within a specific sector of the community (foreign worker dorms, which were always a concern as they're very communal spaces). We've been in a de facto lockdown for a week now, so the next few days will be telling.
Hong Kong, for its part, reported only 4 new cases on Sunday and has been testing aggressively - I think they're around 15,000 tests per million people now.
Yeah but as soon as they lift their draconian measures they are going to get hit with it. This virus is too infectious to contain or control. Meanwhile, economic suicide is going to bring poverty and ruin to billions of people if this carries on.
Yeah, local non-imported cases in Singapore look like they've been increasing exponentially since at least the start of March, as does the number of cases completely unlinked to any previous travel or known case. That last one is particularly worrying because it's likely to be a very laggy indicator of a much bigger pool of undetected cases - because Singapore traces contacts backwards aggressively, the disease has to have been circulating undetected for quite a while beforehand in order to cause this, and since unlinked cases are much harder to detect they're probably not finding most of them. I don't think this is just restricted to foreign worker dorms either, though those are a big problem right now; this seems to go back well before they found all those case in dorms.
> local non-imported cases in Singapore look like they've been increasing exponentially since at least the start of March
MOH provided an annex[1] breaking down new cases by transmission type in the latest update. The data shows that local cases had been increasing, but they're in a slow decline - for now - and most of the new infections are in or related to dorms.
That chart does not look reassuring. The infections in or related to dorms only showed up at the start of April, presumably in part because they started mass-testing those workers around then. The number of non-imported cases has been going up exponentially for much longer than that. Also, they're likely to have a much higher detection rate for those workers than everyone else right now given that's where testing attention is focused, so they probably make up a much lower proportion of actual infections than the figures suggest.
S. Korea, as I understand it, also assigned a trained case worker to every single case or suspected COVID case. This enabled the contact tracing to be quite successful, and something I believe we’ll need to emulate in the US to prevent the next outbreak in the fall.
To add some real-world data to that: In the supermarkets I visit, all over town, the use of carts/drag-carts is forced, they're generally not cleaned by staff, and in the aisles there's a general awareness of avoiding each other and particularly staff, but it's not observed diligently.
I'd say the biggest vector of disease is people not washing their hands before or after visiting the supermarket, and the free-for-all aisle traversal. It would probably take one infected person to sneeze in an aisle to infect lots of other people traveling through said aisle. or infected employees touching various products with their snotty hands.
I can't tell if that's significant, but as a general rule I assume supermarkets are places to visit as infrequently as possible, and to wash my hands before and after.
For the most part it does seem people are changing their behavior though, around here. we pass each other with appropriate distance, and we stand in line with appropriate distance.
It's not like the saran wrap is going to repel anything, it's just easier than cleaning.
Credit card processors and stores working to turn off signature verification (the olds will just have to deal) would make a bigger difference than infrequent cleaning anyway.
Covid-19 in S. Korea @5:13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE-cA4UK07c
My opinion is those apps work because S. Korea remembers SARS-1 (2002/2003), and people there are cooperative. Also, if you do full contact tracing early enough, there aren't an overwhelming number of patients like NY.
S. Korea is the only country that literally "flattened the curve." See unbelievably flat graph @6:50 in link above.
(S. Korea had the same problem as Toronto with SARS-1, where the hospital doctors and nurses were wiped out by the first few cases. In S. Korea, it was the first SARS-1 patient wandering around town like a cruise missile to several doctors and hospitals that spread the disease, as nobody identified the magnitude of the problem.)
> And how will things work with an orderly supermarket queue, where law-abiding people stand patiently six feet apart?
In the SF Bay Area, here's how social distancing works at grocery stores:
1) one entrance/exit with security guards at the door
2) queue outside with shoppers 6' apart
3) only 50 people allowed in at one time, but distance is not enforced in the store except 6' in checkout lanes. However, American grocery stores are large, so the spirit is being followed. Recently, I've seen saran wrap over POS terminals. Bank ATMs also need that prophylactic. :)
4) shoppers are responsible for washing their carts and hands, which is a gap.