The US can't follow the South Korean model because the US does not have the testing infrastructure for it: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-south-korea-scaled-co...

This article presents it as dueling narratives: open versus authoritarian. This implies that, as of now, the US has some choice. But we don't. We screwed up testing when it was small and containable, and now it's not.

South Korea has got over the hump of death count growth NOT because they are preserving the open society, but because they act swiftly. In fact, they acted in late January. When did U.S. acted upon? U.S. squandered 2 months and wait till WHO declared this is a global pandemic.

And they have tested 140k of the cases now and more, how many cases has U.S. tested so far? Not even close.

What about contact tracing? Have you heard South Korea let confirmed cases leave the hospital with fake name + addresses? Or knowing that family members may have infected and still going out to the public? U.S. has. [1][2]

That's the difference you can maintain a society. Lock-up is the second last resort. And then you will have to follow U.K. to let it be.

[1]: https://people.com/human-interest/nj-woman-with-coronavirus-...

[2]: https://www.kcra.com/article/father-of-missouri-coronavirus-...

I heard that South Korea had/has a very large supply of very accurate coronavirus tests. Probably lots of testing is also why their death rates are low (not only hospitalizable cases are counted). Maybe a significant motivator in these decisions is whether or not you can test a lot of people?

> Contrast this with developments in the few days since Italy put its entire country under quarantine, active cases have risen from between 5,000 and 6,000 to over 8,500.

Stopped reading there, it's not worth my time. It takes up to two weeks to develop any symptoms, so remarks like that are either misguided or intentionally misleading.

But didn't South Korea too have aggressive location tracking and even made those details public?

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00740-y

So not exactly CCP style lockdown but not a 2019 style free society either. They did make the hard choices necessary to got it in control. But it wasn't as simple as more testing.

Article presents opinions based on a broad and incomplete picture. This might be the most harmful type of publication right now, the author wants to justify his feelings of "The U.S.'s liberty is expendable, but it doesn't have to be" when the reality is the U.S. was not equipped in the ways S. Korea were. He wanted to make a specific point and ignored the obvious facts that would make the point invalid.

What strikes me is how hard it is to get reliable information on what exactly is being done in specific countries.

In particular: did South Korea shut down its schools?

There is "information" everywhere but no precise or exhaustive data on who did what.

> Actually, there’s a better question: why should the U.S. copy China rather than South Korea?

Because it's too fucking late for the South Korea response. I'm sorry, but asking questions like this at this point is completely useless, and the "wait, woah, slow down" response is exactly the sort of attitude that kept us from being able to pull off what South Korea did in the first place.

The coronavirus containment stories in South Korea and Singapore are being brought up a lot, but both are essentially completely irrelevant to the situation in North America or Europe. South Korea has 9 international airports and a single literally impassable land border; Singapore has one airport and one tightly controlled border crossing bridge. Containment under these circumstances is a somewhat tractable problem. It's comparable to, say, Hawaii, which currently has 13 cases despite the widely incompetent American government response.

Europe has hundreds of international airports and uncountable open border crossings. Containment was never really a possibility in Europe. Containment in mainland North America was even less likely. Even if governments wanted to close borders between states/provinces, there's no mechanism to do so.

They are coming back again (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore...). Numbers are lagging indicators, and the virus grows exponentially. They are going to go up again

Yes, and S.Korea was prepped and ready with tests when the pandemic hit (or shortly thereafter). They tested their country so they knew who had it and who didn't so they could focus efforts. Because testing is hard to get in the U.S. still, the rates are unknown and the only way to prevent it is with social distancing.

On a sort of related note, I presented this as an "Ask HN": Why don't [iWatch, Garmin, Fitbit] wearables have a thermometers? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22581703

I know "core temperature" is hard to take at the wrist, but I'm sure _something_ could be done. Wouldn't this benefit entire nations if the technology could be invented to have hyper-local influenza and pandemic forecasting?

Guess which model we (the U.S.) will choose - Chinese model or S. Korean?

Also, very cool chart in the article.

Article is disingenuous as fuck. Glad to see so many good comments here.