Thailand's unsung Covid-19 success story

2 hours ago, DrTuner said:

The other factor was that they started testing early and have effective tracing program. Once you know the clusters and have prevented further spread, testing in large scale becomes useless as the hit rate for positives plummet. Then you can scale that part back.

 

Dr Plipat from DDC in Thailand tried to explain this in the video with the foreign correspondents club, but it's not valid in Thailand, because they did not test fast enough in the early days (which were probably in November, as in zero tests).

 

Speed is a big factor in both testing (end-to-end including sampling and reporting) and contact tracing. Taiwan and South Korea excelled in this, you can read from Pueyo's article just how thorough they were. As the result, they got it under control.

That's true, but who is they? Thailand? Thailand tested early? They did not test early.

It may well be that Taiwan and South Korea were lightning fast in testing and thus saw no need to further test on a large scale. However, South Korea is a country well known for endemic corruption, it's not clear if their death figures are really accurate, I doubt very much the kind of scrutiny the UK had on death figures was ever applied in South Korea (or Taiwan for that matter). I much prefer the Scandinavian model, or Icelandic model rather, of testing the entire population, and not ceasing to test. Even if you contained initial outbreaks why not keep testing to see how widespread the virus really is?