"Highly contagious and manifesting in some with little or no symptoms, the coronavirus has the world struggling to keep up. But when it comes to containing the epidemic, one country may be cracking the code -- by doubling down on testing.
South Korea is experiencing the largest virus epidemic outside of China, where the pneumonia-causing pathogen first took root late last year. But unlike China, which locked down a province of more than 60 million people to try and stop the illness spreading, Korea hasn’t put any curbs on internal movement in place, instead testing hundreds of thousands of people everywhere from clinics to drive-through stations.
It appears to be paying off in a lower-than-average mortality rate. The outbreak is also showing signs of being largely contained in Daegu, the city about 150 miles south of Seoul where most of the country’s more than 5,700 infections have emerged. South Korea reported the rate of new cases dropped three days in a row." Bloomberg
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1. Testing tells you how many people are infected in the sample.
2. Observation of the infected tells you how lethal the bug really is. In Korea the death rate among the infected seems to be less than 1% and grouped in the old and/or lung compromised.
3. Testing does not cure people. It is an information and data drill.
4. The larger the number of people tested, the greater the panic is likely to be since the numbers coming out of the tests will "reveal" larger and larger numbers of "discovered" infected people creating what may be an illusion of rapid spread. In fact, this virus may have been in the population for a long time.
5. The media have gone mad with desire for a ratings boosting crisis. pl
PS There should be more babble about "therapeutics" and less about "vaccine."
Larger data set. The bigger the data set, the better idea you can get about the actual death rate, what protocols work and what doesn't, vectors where the spread is happening etc. Is it 2% for everyone or 50% for people over 60 with chronic illness? Hard to know if you only test people who show up at the hospital. The more testing done is more data for epidemiologists to study the disease and develop protocols for future outbreaks of new viruses.
Posted by: Travis | 11 March 2020 at 07:18 AM
D
cortisone is a standard treatment for flu, and works well, consequently it was used in COVID but was found to make matters worse. Clinicians are told not to use it
Posted by: JJackson | 11 March 2020 at 06:30 PM