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by scarmig 2007 days ago
I find this argument unconvincing. The UK is an island, and it's doing badly. "But it's highly connected with the rest of the world, so it makes it honorarily a non-island!" Okay, sure. How about South Korea? It isn't an island, and it's doing pretty well. "But it's de facto an island, it's not getting cases from North Korea!" Okay, sure. But by that standard the US is an island: it didn't get its cases from Mexico or Canada.

And, of course, China has more land borders than any other country in the world, and it's managed to engineer the most drastic turnaround of any country in the world.

Having a small number of entry points is useful to limit initial inoculations, but internal policy and cultural cohesion are key for preventing the explosion of any successful inoculation into national disaster, regardless of a polity's geography.
2 comments
fomine3 2005 days ago
You can't say that US is virtually island same as South Korea because US isn't on war with Canada or Mexico.
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irq11 2007 days ago
> How about South Korea? It isn’t an island, and it’s doing pretty well.

Cases are at all-time highs, and have pretty much escalated out of control:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020...

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howlgarnish 2007 days ago
All-time high being around 1000 cases per day in a country of 50M, and they haven't given up yet -- they've successfully beaten back two previous waves.
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irq11 2006 days ago
“all-time high“ meaning “all-time high“...and continuing to accelerate.

I love the way you keep shifting the goalposts. When you’re shown that they haven’t controlled the virus, you pretend that it matters what the absolute magnitude of the case count is today. To wit: “You just don’t understand exponential growth!”

By the way, Korea has tested about 2M people, total, or about the same number of tests that the US did yesterday. So yeah...they’re probably finding a few less cases:

http://ncov.mohw.go.kr/en

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dehrmann 2006 days ago
It was 100 cases per day two months ago, and their peak after the initial wave was 441 per day. It's not as bad as the US or UK, but they don't have the virus under control right now.
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turing_complete 2006 days ago
Just compare their numbers to Europe or the US.
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