It appears that South Korea has figured out how to beat the wuflu simply by being very careful and doing tons of testing.
they didn't have to destroy their economy just use lots of common sense and dont be fool hardy.
‘Maximum power’
In South Korea as in Italy, an early case of COVID-19 was identified when a medical officer followed their intuition, rather than the official guidelines, on testing.
The country’s first case was a 35-year-old Chinese woman who tested positive on Jan. 20. But the largest outbreak was detected after the 31st patient, a 61-year-old woman from South Korea’s southeastern city of Daegu, was diagnosed on Feb. 18.
Like the patient named Mattia in Italy, the woman had no known links to Wuhan, the Chinese province where the disease was first identified. And as in Italy, the doctors’ decision to recommend a test went against guidelines at the time to test people who had been to China or been in contact with a confirmed case, said Korea Medical Association’s Choi Jaewook.
“Patient 31,” as she became known, was a member of a secretive church which Deputy Minister for Health and Welfare Kim Gang-lip said has since linked to 61% of cases. Infections spread beyond the congregation after the funeral of a relative of the church’s founder was held at a nearby hospital, and there were several other smaller clusters around the country.
Once the church cluster was identified, South Korea opened around 50 drive-through testing facilities around the country.
In empty parking lots, medical staff in protective clothing lean into cars to check their passengers for fever or breathing difficulties, and if needed, collect samples. The process usually takes about 10 minutes, and people usually receive the results in a text reminding them to wash their hands regularly and wear face masks.
A total of 117 institutions in South Korea have equipment to conduct the tests, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC). The numbers fluctuate daily, but an average of 12,000 is possible, and maximum capacity is 20,000 tests a day. The government pays for tests of people with symptoms, if referred by a doctor. Otherwise, people who want to be tested can pay up to 170,000 won ($140), said an official at a company called Seegene Inc, which supplies 80% of the country’s kits and says it can test 96 samples at once.
There are also 130 quarantine officers like Kim Jeong-hwan, who focus on minute details to track potential patients. The 28-year-old public health doctor spends his whole working days remotely checking up on people who have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
Kim, who is doing military service, is one of a small army of quarantine officers who track the movements of any potential carriers of the disease by phone, app or the signals sent by cell phones or the black boxes in automobiles. Their goal: To trace all the contacts people may have had, so they too can be tested.
“I haven’t seen anyone telling bad lies,” Kim said. “But lots of people generally don’t remember exactly what they did.”
Underlining their determination, quarantine officers told Reuters they located five cases after a worker in a small town caught the virus and went to work in a “coin karaoke,” a bar where a machine lets people sing a few songs for a dollar. At first, the woman, who was showing symptoms, did not tell the officers where she worked, local officials told Reuters. But they put the puzzle together after questioning her acquaintances and obtaining GPS locations on her mobile device.
“Now, quarantine officers have maximum power and authority,” said Kim Jun-geun, an official at Changnyeong County who collects information from quarantine officers.
South Korea’s government also uses location data to customize mass messages sent to cellphones, notifying every resident when and where a nearby case is confirmed.
Lee Hee-young, a preventative medicine expert who is also running the coronavirus response team in South Korea’s Gyeonggi province, said South Korea has gone some of the way after MERS to increase its infrastructure to respond to infectious diseases. But she said only 30% of the changes the country needs have happened. For instance, she said, maintaining a trained workforce and up-to-date infrastructure at smaller hospitals isn't’t easy.
“Until we fix this,” Lee said, “explosions like this can keep blowing up anywhere.”
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several points here
1. use common sense
2. test those who need it like mad
3. don't shut down the economy use it for benefit of killing off the wuflu.
4. there appear to be hot spots all over each and every country italy-the north,us broward/dade counties,NYC,other areas,key in on them and kill off lots of problems.
If 100,000 people are tested, that means 1000 positives. If the rate of infection is high, e.g. 10,000 out of 100,000 then that is ok. But if the rate of infection is very low, e.g.10 in 100,000, then there will be 1100 cases of which only 1000 are real. It will be a fake epidemic.