Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by sfj | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

sfj

> S. Korea is the only country that literally "flattened the curve." See unbelievably flat graph @6:50 in link above.

Taiwan has also done so. It has a similar story, burned by SARS, also.

https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En

View on HN

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.

I suppose that's one way of looking at it.

But using the "hammer and the dance" metaphor, if you start the dance (containment) early enough, there is no need to bring the hammer (because no big spike to flatten). https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-th...

The problem is that this doesn't seem to be universally true. Singapore and Hong Kong have had to bring the hammer anyway.

Of course there is no guarantee that containment (the dance) will be done correctly.

Cases in both Singapore and Hong Kong are on the rise, so it's a bad example of the containment, unlike South Korea one.

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.

1. https://www.moh.gov.sg/docs/librariesprovider5/pressroom/pre...

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.

Similarly, the Indian state of Kerala has done it, too. They were stung by the Nipah virus.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/aggressive-testing-cont... or https://outline.com/bPStnx

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Nipah_virus_outbreak_in_K...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com