S.Korea
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s vice health minister has urged vigilance to maintain hard-won gains against the new coronavirus.
Kim Gang-lip expressed concerns over loosened attitudes toward social distancing that he says puts the country at potential risk of an infection “explosion” similar to Europe and the United States.
His warning on Monday came after the country reported 47 new cases of the coronavirus, the smallest daily jump since Feb. 20. Infections have continued to wane in the worst-hit city of Daegu, where 6,781 of the country’s 10,284 cases have been reported.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/04/06/business/ap-virus-outbreak-the-latest.html?searchResultPosition=5
For what it’s worth, there was a FluBro on another thread making the case for letting it rip through the country. He basically said two things:
1) He agrees that older people will need to isolate. He didn’t quite try to explain how that works, since not all old people live alone, or are capable of living alone, much less for what may be several months. Nor did he define just what constitutes being ‘old’.
2) He said that the virus death rate for younger people was the same as the flu. This is one that made me want to reply (but he wasn’t worth my time). The death rate of the flu, for ALL Americans is something like 1 out of 1000 cases...which comes pretty close to matching the death rate for the youngest victims of Coronavirus. Two things here:
a) The Coronavirus doesn’t look at your birth certificate to determine whether to kill you. The increase in death rate is does grow with age, in what appear to be a smooth curve - so if you’re 45 years old, you do have a significantly higher chance of dying than someone 25 years old - even though most here would agree that 45 years of age does not make you an ‘old person’.
b) The flu kills OLD PEOPLE - Just like Coronavirus, the death rate from the flu is not constant throughout age groups. I doubt anyone here can think of a single case of a child, or even a young adult, dying from the flu. Although I haven’t done the math, even at 0.1%, I wouldn’t be surprised if Coronavirus would become the leading cause of death for the younger age groups, if left unchecked.