April 28, 2024

The Queens County Citizen

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What can the US learn from Asia about squeezing Covid (opinions)

What we can learn from South Korea about containing Covid-19

While coronaviruses continue to damage the country, with confirmed cases exceeding 1 million and deaths increasing day by day, several states revoked orders to stay at home in hopes of saving the economy. With so many lives at stake, it is time for the United States to look to countries in the Asia Pacific region that have succeeded in controlling a pandemic to find ways to save themselves and the economy.

Several places in the Asia-Pacific, including Australia, China, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam, have reported on the persecution. reproduction amount – the average number of people affected by a disease from one infected person – to under 1, without the need for continuous, widespread lockdown.

They are now quickly and successfully suppressing epidemics by isolating those who are infected and contact those who might be infected.

As if there are two worlds.

The United States has more than 66,000 deaths, or about 20 deaths per 100,000 people. Number of deaths per 100,000 people reported in Western European countries also very high: Belgium, 67; France, 37; Italy, 47; Germany, 8; Spain, 53; and Sweden, 26.

Meanwhile, rates reported in Asia and Oceania are much lower: Australia, 0.4; China, 0.3; New Zealand, 0.4; South Korea, 0.5; Taiwan, 0.03.

Despite the big differences, America seems to be blind to the strategies used by other countries to control the virus. How can one part of the world succeed, while another part refuses to learn lessons from success?

On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal praising the goodness of German efforts compared to the United States, France, Italy, and Spain, without even mentioning that the German death rate per million itself is more than 100 times higher than Taiwan and Hong Kong, and more than 10 times higher than in Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea.

How did these countries succeed to date?

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Many have adopted national public health standards, using cellular technology, government professionalism, widespread use of face masks and hand sanitizers, and intensive public health services to isolate infected individuals or those who might be infected.

Testing has played an important role, but it hasn’t become everything and everything as is sometimes believed in the United States.

Vietnam has it works, for example, by tracking contacts and an aggressive quarantine regime. When one person is confirmed positive, many of his close contacts – even those without symptoms – are isolated. As a result, Vietnam only tested a small number of people as part of the population because it managed to control the plague so effectively. Vietnam, with around 95 million people, has not reported one Covid-19 death so far.
In New Zealand, the government began to relax lockdown restrictions because officials said they were now in a position to test and track each new infection group.

Following are careful and precise words from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. “There is no broad community transmission that is not detected in New Zealand. We have won that battle. But we must remain vigilant if we want to stay that way.”

There are similar success stories in most areas.

South Korea, which has dramatically destroyed the epidemic with aggressive testing, contact tracking and basic public health measures such as thermal monitoring, has also used digital technology to combat Covid-19, according to a new report. South Korea uses a text alert system to provide information to the public, while various applications allow people to track new Covid-19 cases, make doctor appointments or monitor hotspots to avoid.

The government also uses the application to monitor people in quarantine, through self-reported symptoms and location tracking. Despite the fact that this application can increase privacy concerns in the United States, the result is an open economy, albeit with caution, along with the suppression of new infections.

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The US government is totally unable to learn from these successful cases.

President Donald Trump is incompetent and his appointees in Health and Human Services, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Transportation Safety Administration have failed to provide leadership. America First has placed us first in death in the world, with tens of thousands of lives wasted as a result.

We can save ourselves and our economy, if we see and learn from the achievements of other countries. And if the federal government continues to fail, it seems, our governors and mayors must step forward to do the work.

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