objectobot.com

Nations that learned their lessons from Sars and Mers are fairing better than the rest of the world who have not experienced a recent outbreak. Taiwan and Singapore who learned their lesson from Sars enacted early travel restrictions from China and aggressively tracked where the virus was circulating early on.

South Korea is a different case, they had a similar explosion of new cases we are now seeing in Europe and the United States, but were able to turn it around, how did they do it?

South Korea learned their lesson from Mers, and that lesson was testing everyone. South Korea like the US has a rich biotech industry made up of many small companies lead by scientists. After China published the sequence for the coronavirus, these companies, not hampered by their version of the CDC were able to quickly create tests. For a country of 50 million people, they were able to test 20,000 people a day. With CDC in the US removing their restrictions, the biotech industry in the US is now also beginning to produce a test that only takes 45 minutes for results.

South Korea is defeating the virus by testing everyone, including hundreds of thousands of asymptomatic people, many of them through drive through testing facilities. Those who test positive are of course then quarantined. Though these measures are somewhat intrusive, they are nothing compared with the draconian measures that US and other western countries are now undertaking due to the failure to produce enough tests.

You either quarantine the sick, or you quarantine everyone. Due to the CDC sluggish response, the US has no other choice but to quarantine everyone, at a great economic cost.

When we come out of this I hope we learn a lesson. Centralizing anything, especially something as important as our health, to a large bureaucratic authority, that pays no price for being wrong, is the dumbest way to do things. Many people seem to understand when large investment banks make mistakes that ripple through the entire country, so they call for a break up of the banks. However, when a government body, in orders of manganites more centralized than any industry, has nearly absolute power of our healthcare decisions, this is perfectly fine?

In the meantime, please stay at home. With the asymptomatic characteristics of this virus, you may not even know that you are a carrier.