South Korea: 234 deaths 8042 recovered. China: 4632 deaths, 77k recovered[1]. Their treatment protocol is an order of magnitude better than every other country. What are they doing that we're not? This is a huge glaring discrepancy. What's the difference between their treatment protocols and everyone else's?
What's the difference between their treatment protocols and everyone else's?
It's mind boggling anyone has to ask now this has been going on so long but here goes.
1) They had an approach plan beforehand because they had observed the previous SARS epidemic and took the danger seriously.
2) They had "quarantine hotels" freely available for those who were positive to prevent them from infecting others. (Seattle has a few of these, I've heard but they aren't widespread in the US. The idea of housing people freely is anethema to the US.)
3) They did testing early and often.
4) Their doctors and nurses worked with full PPEs, full anti-contamination suits, so they didn't themselves massively spread the illness.
5) They reserved hospitals specifically for the epidemic and had protocols for sending people to these hotel.
6) They had drive through testing and other testing easily and freely available (the US plan of profiting from testing is just so "I can't even").
7) They did systematic contact tracing with an app for people to discover where infectious people had been.
8) They did social distancing with mask from the start.
-- The US had literally done NONE of this. What the US has done is last-ditch efforts by states after the ostensibly responsible parties (the CDC etc) failed massively. And the Federal government is now literally sabotaging the states.
The thing I don't get is this explains how people didn't get sick. What it doesn't explain is how so many got better after getting sick compared to other countries.
The fatality rate of countries with active epidemics is skewed by a variety of factors:
- With exponential growth, most cases will new and so not become potentially lethal. This can lower the observed fatality rate (I think this explained Germany's original "great" rate which doesn't look at great any more).
- With cases rising quickly, most countries don't have infrastructure or the time to increase testing (US testing is failing on multiple levels but even France, Spain and Italy are just overwhelmed with the sick and testing is less important).
- With cases rising quickly, the fatality rate increases as hospitals are no longer able to provide adequate care.
- Different countries have different age-profiles and the disease hits the elderly harder (but once hospitals break down, the odds for the young decrease).
South Korea's fatality rate is similar to the ostensible fatality rate of Turkey and Luxembourg but likely for different rate. We probably won't have a complete idea what's happened until these events are done.
Well, their CFR is currently around 2%. I tend to think this will be roughly the best that can be achieved considering their investment in both T&T as well as an excellent healthcare system.
If you are effective at preventing the spread, then you can get lucky in terms of protecting the more vulnerable. I'd love to see some demographic breakdowns of deaths/infections in SK to see if they mirror the general population, or skew a different direction.
The "recovered" numbers in other countries aren't even close to accurate.
Countries with large outbreaks are only testing people with severe symptoms. Korea is testing anyone who comes near someone with the virus. So are catching close to everyone who has it.
Western countries most likely still aren't testing mild patients.
SK and China went for full containment: every single positive case is hospitalized and close contacts are quarantined in hotels so few cases are missed.
While in New York, hospitals are focused on saving critical patients. If you test positive but have mild symptoms, you are usually let home anyway so it doesn't really make sense to test most people who would be taken very seriously in Asia.
[1]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/