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Comment by analyte123 | Hacker News Reader

The outbreak in the US is not particularly "outsized" compared to other developed countries: https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=fra&are...

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I'd still say ours is outsized, because the US outbreak is essentially the same outbreak we had months ago. Those other countries are on their second or third outbreaks.

Their outbreaks reach higher peaks than ours, but only for a month or so, and then come down to a much lower level than ours, making our one outbreak worse than any of their outbreaks.

Look at Australia and New Zealand. Both free and open societies with high per capita GDP. They both have achieved zero community transmission through stringent travel restrictions and a nationwide strategy. It’s disgraceful that we can’t do the same or better in the US.

In both NZ and Australia it took real leadership by government, and a population overwhelmingly willing to listen to them and to follow the science.

(In Australia's case it has been leadership by state government over the complete opposite by their federal government)

In the US we have real anti-leadership. Our leaders repeatedly cast doubt on science and common sense in order to reduce their own culpability. They spread the myth that there is ‘nothing we can do’ about COVID until we have a vaccine when other countries have proven this to be false.

I think we should look at the case rate for measuring outbreaks, instead of the death rate. I wouldn't say "outsized", but the US' incidence rate is above most developed nations'.

Also, I didn't know that Austria and Switzerland were having such a problem.

https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=fra&are...

This is not meant to be a rebuttal to your comment, but a discussion.

Consider the case of South Korea and Japan.

1. Dense populations.

2. Very little Covid19.

3. Relatively low lock-down related economic impact.

4. Nearly universal mask wear.

Honest question: what else do we need to know?

I strongly suspect that if the United States, or any other country, had nearly universal mask wearing, we'd have a strong economy AND pretty low infection rates.

I'd love for somebody 'in the know' to modify/correct any of my assertions.

Masks are the thing you do if you cannot socially distance. We have good evidence for social distancing, we don't yet (for a variety of reasons) have good evidence for mask wearing.

You point to South Korea, and then claim it's the masks. But there's a bunch of other stuff they're also doing (because of their experience with coronaviruses): earlier lockdown, harder lockdown, much better test trace and isolate programmes, more social adherence to prevention measures such as hand washing and distancing and mask wearing, people with symptoms choosing to self-isolate, travel restrictions, etc.

You need all of it at the same time, but especially distancing.

Thanks for this, I appreciate it. I'm aware of some of the details you mentioned.

> harder lockdown

So I did some more digging, and found this:

https://thediplomat.com/2020/11/south-korea-faces-another-po...

This broadly supports what you're saying. Their success has been due to many rigorous and (near?) universally adopted protocols, not just mask wearing.

Yeah, and they take all the camera data from CCTV and all the mobile phone data, as well as the contact tracing data (with QR codes to a central system) and use that for contact tracing.

They are trading off liberty for security, and it seems to be working out well for them.

I can only imagine how crazy the US would have gone if the government had tried to do any of this.

In deaths, somewhat true. But in cases, the US in the upper-eschelon!

Why are cases important? Assuming PCR, can get whatever result you want with the cycle threshold (discussion begins around minute 3:50):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_Vy6fgaBPE

Want more positive cases? Use a higher threshold. Want to scare the population into compliance? Use a higher threshold. Want to demonstrate that person X or policy Y was effective against stopping spread? Use a lower threshold.

This is pure FUD. Why spread misinformation?

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