04-30-2020, 12:34 PM
(04-30-2020, 12:05 PM)David Horn Wrote: Are you serious? South Korea got on the job starting day one, and kept the problem from getting started in the first place. That's no longer an option for us. If we had been testing, contact tracing and isolating back when the Donald was saying things would take care of themselves, we might have been able to do it here too.
That's not what the facts show. In fact, South Korea blew it at the beginning by failing to restrict travel from China until too late, which is why they had to deal with an epidemic that Japan and Taiwan, who restricted travel very quickly, never had to deal with. The US did better than South Korea during that period.
South Korea did ramp up their testing and such, but by the time that was ramped up, cases were already falling steeply due to earlier voluntary measures and the lucky school closure. The only reason this wasn't obvious at the time was because it takes a couple weeks for changes in new cases to show up in testing, and there was a lot of panic and noise during that two weeks.