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Comment by GVIrish | Hacker News Reader

I would go one step further. We wouldn't have had to close schools for so long or at all if we had responded aggressively to Covid before the outbreak got large. South Korea largely controlled their outbreak without lockdowns because they aggressively tested, contact traced, and quarantined in the early days of the pandemic. Today, South Korea has something like 1/300th as many deaths even though it has about 1/5th the population of the United States.

The US had its first confirmed case on the same day as South Korea but was much slower to respond. Had we had a more robust response, we might not have had to make these tough choices about closing schools.

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There were intimations at closing down the border from President Trump, howls of racism were made. Nancy Pelosi went down to Chinatown and asked what was the president afraid of.

The president tried to take action, but politics was and is involved. We have a report from last week saying that scientists were afraid to speak up because of fear for saying orange man bad was correct.

If you believe these super simple arguments of hard lock downs would have worked, then look at how the guy at imperial college who screwed us all over with his horrible forecasts. He said “lockdown to save is all.” Then proceeds to visit his mistress, one of the two had coronavirus! How do you think we could legitimately implement a lockdown when the people who scream lockdown do not implement it themselves (athletes sneaking ladies, Newsome, Whitmer, etc.).

Pelosi flouted the lockdown too by getting her hair done at a salon that wasn't allowed to open.

This, and not just the US, the West in general. Everyone concerned about the long term consequences of these closures needs to look no further than our leadership mostly ignoring it and thinking we were somehow immune. Heck, even after taking some measures, many parts of the nation/world then reopened too early only to see multiple surges.

It is certainly not true that South Korea's measures have succeeded in eliminating community spread, which has been significant (if not at the same level as the U.S.) since the start of winter. East Asians seem to be more resistant to SARS-CoV-2: their new case rate of about 1/20th the U.S. (1/4 on a per-capita basis) is translating into a death rate around 1/300th of ours.

Lockdowns have been largely orthogonal to school closures -- much of Europe kept its schools open while pursuing even more draconian lockdown measures than blue states in the U.S. "Just lockdown, test, and trace harder" is not the lesson from South Korea.

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