Friday, March 29, AD 2024 3:00am

Updated Korean Data

Post over at Spin, Strangeness and Charm.

Long quote:

 

Table 5 from the Korean CDC report, March 18, 2020
Let’s have a good look at this. Preliminary remark: Korea started a massive testing (according to Table 1 in the same report, nearly 300,000 people have been tested, at a current rate of 10,000 a day) and tracking program early, leveraging all available tech data — privacy concerns be darned.

Observation 1: overall mortality is 1 (one) percent. Still one percent too much, to be sure. But considerably lower than what has been reported from some other places — I suspect because of undertesting.

Observation 2: mortality in the 0-29 age bracket is nil — not one death out of 2,867 patients.

Observation 3: in the 30-49 age bracket, just two (2) deaths out of 2,044 patients, or about 0.1%. Only above 50 does mortality start rising, over 60 in a worrisome fashion. (Not coincidentally, so do comorbidities/pre-existing conditions. I would love to see the statistics broken down between otherwise healthy people and those with chronic cardiovascular/pulmonary/immunity/diabetes problems, or cancer patients. Hypertension is apparently another major risk factor.)

Observation 4: Note the interesting “gender gap”. Men (1.39%) have nearly twice the mortality of women (0.75%). I asked friends on Facebook familiar with South Korea, and they told me over half of men smoke, compared to fewer than five percent of women.

Picture of the table, links to more data, and more information is available at the original.
Figured the information would be enough to get a click-through.

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Bob Kurland, Ph.D.
Admin
Wednesday, March 18, AD 2020 11:30am

This result is what is implied by the article I cited in comments on
“The Great Panic of 2020”

Bob Kurland, Ph.D.
Admin
Wednesday, March 18, AD 2020 12:17pm

And thanks for posting this Foxfier

Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Wednesday, March 18, AD 2020 12:39pm

Good post, Foxfier. I remain very concerned that people would rather trade their freedom to go where they wish and do what they want for a temporary feeling of safety. I am NOT saying we shouldn’t be prudent. Good hygiene, good cleaning practices, maintaining safe social distance. avoidance of re-handling things unnecessarily, coughing into one’s elbow, discarding used tissues properly, etc. And if you’re sick, staying at home. But this worldwide panic is surreal. I just went to the grocery store here in the Charlotte, NC area – shelves of canned goods, dry goods, cleaning supplies, etc. are empty! This is unfathomable! Yes, I am worried. Either the govt know a lot more about this virus that it’s letting on – for example, delayed deadliness later in otherwise health infected people – or this is a test run by world governments in locking down control over the population. Am I being paranoid? A conspiracy theorist? A little wacky? Folks, like you, I have NEVER seen things like this and I doubt that during the depths of WW II things were like this, either.

TomD
TomD
Wednesday, March 18, AD 2020 12:40pm

Back when I was in aerospace I worked with many foreign clients from the Pacific basin. The South Koreans were easily the most impressive, especially in how they balanced individual initiative and collective goals. After the COVID-19 dust settles the world should study the South Korean example closely, and not just the government policy side but also the sociological side.

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Wednesday, March 18, AD 2020 1:21pm

[T]his worldwide panic is surreal. I just went to the grocery store here in the Charlotte, NC area – shelves of canned goods, dry goods, cleaning supplies, etc. are empty! This is unfathomable! Yes, I am worried. Either the govt know a lot more about this virus that it’s letting on – for example, delayed deadliness later in otherwise health infected people – or this is a test run by world governments in locking down control over the population. Am I being paranoid? A conspiracy theorist? A little wacky? Folks, like you, I have NEVER seen things like this and I doubt that during the depths of WW II things were like this, either.

It seems to me there are several interrelated factors to explain both the (over?)reaction to the actual disease threat and the reaction to the reaction.
The first is the ongoing deligitimation of the “elite” (power elite, best and brightest, pros from Dover –all the ways we describe the people who went to the right schools, made the right connections and landed the right jobs to be the ones running government, finance and industry across the globe –the people who confabulate at Davos and all the other places they like to get together and pretend they’re Hollywood celebrities at the award season afterparties) based upon the failure of technocratic expertise to continue to deliver on it’s promises. Maybe a better way to put that is it’s the breakdown of the postwar consensus that Glen Reynolds and others have been talking about for the past four plus years.
The second is the lost of trust in all our institutions based upon that failure and consequent delegitimization. We don’t trust that the “experts” know what they’re talking about, and we don’t trust the media to fairly and accurately report what the “experts” have to say, so we don’t know how to evaluate what we’re being told, or how to act upon that information.
The third factor is the one that ties the previous two together and makes the whole bigger than the sum of its parts: civilizational decadence.

The last I suspect is driven by a general loss of faith.

Bob S. in PI
Bob S. in PI
Thursday, March 19, AD 2020 9:10am

I am curious how much of the (thankfully marvelous) difference between Italy’s death rates and S. Korea’s comes from their different approaches. S. Korea conducted a rapid lockdown of Daegu, followed by aggressive contact tracing and quarantine. They also tried using hydroxychloroquine (a anti-malarial drug) to help get zinc into the cells to interrupt the RNA virus replication process. So it seems there are significant subelements which are different due to how S. Korea counter-attacked the Wuhan coronavirus; these in turn produced different results. I sense that the mortality rates will differ depending upon what tactics are used and how aggressively. I’ve spent months in S. Korea – a very disciplined, proud society. Its soldiers are exceedingly tough and well respected. I applaud what they accomplished. I am surprised no one in the media asked why the US didn’t get test kits from S. Korea; they’ve been using them for six weeks…

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Thursday, March 19, AD 2020 9:20am

I’m guessing the Koreans, unlike Italians, know better than to believe Chinese propaganda.
Probably helped that 300,000 Chinese weren’t working in their leather industry too.

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