Democrats Have a Real Problem, Part VII
South Korea
South Korea has emerged as an early hero in the global fight against the COVID-19/Wuhan virus pandemic. A combination of widespread early testing and aggressive tracking measures allowed it to flatten its curve of new cases after one of the world’s earliest clusters to emerge outside of mainland China. It has thus avoided the onslaught of cases and deaths caused by the virus in so many other countries.
In the United States, South Korea’s performance against the novel coronavirus has become something of a rallying cry for anti-Trump die-hards, including those in the Democrat-friendly media.
The party line says South Korea is kicking the hell out of the virus relative to America because it moved quickly on testing and tracking while the Trump Administration dawdled, then fumbled its initial response. Consequently, Seoul deserves credit for its management of its outbreak whereas Washington DC deserves unrelenting criticism. The logic being that the more severe crisis can be laid at the feet of President Donald Trump and his goons for their failure to deploy similarly effective countermeasures, specifically early testing. A quick googling of the subject reveals entries endorsing the idea from The Nation, Reuters, NBC, The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, and so on ad nauseam. Even after the US got off its duff and began testing hundreds of thousands of people a week, the testing narrative persists and has morphed into bizarre claims that Trump is lying about how US screening stacks up, pointing to per capita rates as proof (since South Korea with a population of 52 million still outpaces America with population of 331 million).
This is idiotic for a couple reasons.
First, while the ‘Korea did more testing and stopped the spread; US didn’t and didn’t’ line of reasoning looks really strong, it begins to fray when viewed through a more non-partisan lens. In this piece by the Times, you can see that testing was not the only thing South Korea did differently than Uncle Sam. It also brought to bear a sophisticated system of monitoring and tracking its residents using security cameras, thermal imaging cameras, cell phones, and other surveillance assets:
South Koreans’ cellphones vibrate with emergency alerts whenever new cases are discovered in their districts. Websites and smartphone apps detail hour-by-hour, sometimes minute-by-minute, timelines of infected people’s travel — which buses they took, when and where they got on and off, even whether they were wearing masks...People ordered into self-quarantine must download another app, which alerts officials if a patient ventures out of isolation. Fines for violations can reach $2,500.
Anyone complaining about the US not instituting similar measures is lying.
Nobody on the left wants the Trump Administration having access to that kind of surveillance apparatus and nobody on the right wants any administration having access to it. How many lawsuits do you think the ACLU would file if thermal imaging cameras started popping up in every large building in America? As is usually the case in our fair nation, the brunt of the discomfort and abuses created by such granular access to private data would be borne by the most vulnerable people amongst us. Furthermore, even if the public and political will were there to create it, the current absence of such capabilities could hardly be blamed on Donnie 45. Creating any system approaching what was deployed by South Korea from scratch, then scaling it to cover more than 331 million people would take more than four years for the most efficient government on the planet (and ours ain’t that).
That is not to argue the Trump Administration’s failure on early testing is irrelevant or unremarkable.
The US fancies itself one of the most advanced countries in the world; this is particularly true of Trump and his followers. That we were unable to move quickly, efficiently, and effectively deserves scrutiny and criticism. The question remains, however, how much difference it would’ve made in the absence of draconian containment protocols. Even the Times acknowledges as much in this deep dive into the administration’s early errors:
Had the United States been able to track its earliest movements and identify hidden hot spots, local quarantines might have confined the disease.
Although the “might” in that sentence is quickly put aside, the authors still admit it’s not a certainty that early testing in the US would’ve staunched the viral spread. More problematic, the article makes absolutely no effort to demonstrate a causal link between the eventual spread and the delay caused by the administration’s undeniable errors. The argument seems to be ‘here are the failures, here’s how they delayed testing, the US outbreak is a lot worse, and you fill in the rest.’
That’s a bad argument in support of the tenor and magnitude of the criticism trained on the President and his task force.
Especially since the US outbreak currently looks more similar to South Korea’s than it does to the European countries struggling so badly (i.e. Italy, Spain, France, etc.).
This is the second reason the media’s fixation on South Korea’s response is idiotic.
Go back to that article accusing President Trump of lying about the United States’ testing capability. The crux of the argument is that a per capita comparison is necessary to get an accurate read on each country’s testing capabilities. Although it doesn’t lead to the conclusion that Trump is lying, that’s still a fair argument.
Of course, it’s a fair argument that applies to the gruesome numbers, too.
For example, South Korea’s death toll looks minuscule next to America’s when you look at the absolute numbers (165 total deaths vs. 4,066), but more revealing is that South Korea is currently seeing 3.2 deaths per million people of population whereas the US is seeing 12.4. Now, South Korea is clearly still doing much better than the US, but the point is America’s deaths per million people of population is a lot closer to South Korea’s than it is to Italy’s 205.7, Spain’s 193.8, Belgium’s 72.5, Holland’s 68.1, France’s 52.6, or Switzerland’s 50.8.
Likewise, it seems safe to say South Korea has done a terrific job limiting the overall spread of its Wuhan virus outbreak. Comparing number of cases is dangerous since countries aren’t using the same testing approach, but it’s not totally meaningless. Korea is seeing 193 cases per million people of population. That’s light years better than America’s respective total of 576, but America’s mark is still much better than Italy’s 1,750, Spain’s 2,186, Switzerland’s 1,949, or Belgium’s 1,222.
When the differences are normalized based on population size, South Korea’s pandemic countermeasures still look better than America’s, but the margin narrows.
And, again, we must return to the question: How much of this can be attributed to early testing (which the US should have been able to replicate) versus containment protocols (which the US could not have replicated)?
Because Germany has also drawn rave reviews for its success in containing its outbreak with many of those reviews focused on its early testing. But Germany’s adjusted numbers (9.6 deaths and 879 cases per million people of population) are even closer to America’s.
It should go without saying that things can still change and change fast. America’s outbreak could simply lag behind its European counterparts and our numbers could continue spiking. It could be the signs of countermeasures beginning to work are just false hope. But that moment hasn’t yet arrived and if it doesn’t arrive, the mainstream media will be left explaining months of applauding South Korea and hammering the Trump Administration for making America the new epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic.
That will play to Trump’s extreme advantage. In an election year. This is a real problem.
