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Comment by leereeves | Hacker News Reader

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> South Korea is on a whole different level of testing than the US

According to [1] and [2], the US has performed twice as many tests per capita as South Korea. Roughly:

The US has performed 8.9 million tests for a population of 330 million (27 tests per thousand people).

South Korea has performed 660 thousand tests for a population of 50 million (13 tests per thousand people).

1: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/

2: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#how-many-tota...

> According to [1] and [2], the US has performed twice as many tests per capita as South Korea.

That's probably because South Korea managed to quickly contain the spread by starting large-scale testing much much earlier. And its number of new daily cases of COVID-19 reached the peak on February 29.

Not to mention, thanks to contact tracing, South Korea's tests are more targeted.

Yes, they were on a different level in February, because the first batch of tests from the CDC was defective. Not now.

maybe the difference is who they are testing. I mean, US started testing later, and is not doing testing based on who came in contact with positives. So, people continue to spread until they get sick, IF they get symptomatic.

Or government response isn't the reason for the difference.

Japan's government didn't respond quickly to COVID-19 (some have even said they actively tried to downplay it to protect the Olympics) and yet Japan has very few cases.

Perhaps the difference is cultural, or geographic, or travel patterns, or something else entirely.

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