how was south korea able to scale up their testing so fast. Where did the extra testing capacity come from. I've been really curious about this but haven't seen any good answers so far.
It is am extremely stark example of the value of maintaining manufacturing capacity in your country. Korea can makes tests, so they have tests.
Seegene, a company that makes Covid-19 testing equipment is in Korea. They just needed approval and to ramp up manufacturing. For most countries, like the US, we don't have the manufacturing ability anymore, so we have to go beg and buy tests while we figure how to make again. Seegene alone has been responsible for 80% of the tests in Korea.
Not so long ago, East Asia was hit by another epidemic virus. So they are better prepared than many other countries. They have reserved workforce, researchers, and labs to deal with it in South Korea. Therefore, they were able to mass produce fast test kits so quickly.
The population is also better prepared for this situation. They still remember it and know they have to follow all the advice coming from government and health experts.
Even before the spread of Covid-19 outside China, all East Asians started to use face masks. I'm not saying mask helped them, I mean that just shows how their society still remembers the last time that they were hit by a virus.
Afaik, the shortage in US is mainly of raw materials and commodity items like pipettes. How did Seegene ramp up its raw material pipeline so quickly. Really fascinating success.
Korea has a broad swath of medical manufacturing capacity. A large part of the supply chain is already there, so it is easier for them to ramp up. You can double or triple output just by putting more shifts into the factories. Then you start retooling, repurposing to really ramp up.
The US could have ramped up production, but politics and regulation prevented it. The CDC and FDA prevented any private companies from producing their own tests and in the meantime the CDC made their own small batch of tests that weren’t even accurate. If the president had taken the outbreak seriously we could have begun test production immediately, which is what South Korea did the moment they heard about the outbreak. This is largely due to systems put in place during and after the SARS and MERS outbreaks.
South Korea has far superior legal framework for pandemic compared to most western countries. As soon as there is a sign of a beginning pandemic, the medical professionals automatically get a massive increase in power and can start enacting lots of policies regardless of what politician think.
They where probably better prepared as well. Preparedness varies a lot. In the Nordic region where I am from the Finns have done better than the rest of us because they are a prepper nation. They constantly prepare for the worst.
Finland has enormous bunkers under their cities that can hold the whole population with air filters, water, food stock piles etc. Finland has massive stock piles of medical equipment, even stockpiles of raw materials for making ammunition medication etc.
In many ways I think it has paid for them to not be NATO members. They know they are alone and have to take care of themselves just like in the winter war against the Soviet Union.
In Norway I think we place too much faith in NATO. If it was up to me I would get the hell out and focus on self reliance instead.
> In the Nordic region where I am from the Finns have done better than the rest of us because they are a prepper nation. They constantly prepare for the worst.
I am sure the Finns have done a fine job, but I don't think one can say that "the Finns have done better than the rest of us because they are a prepper nation" without studying this in detail. Being prepared is important, but just one part of the equation.
Travelling is also another important part (I am sure there are many others as well).
Looking at passenger statistics, the Finnish population seems to be traveling less by air than most Nordic countries as well. I have not extracted domestic flights and if flights are done by the citizens of the country where the airports are located, so these numbers are ballpark figures, but I guess they can give some insight (although domestic flights might cause more rapid spread of virus as well).
Looking at the five biggest Airports in each country in: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, I get the following passenger numbers for each country per year:
Iceland: 21,7 flights per person, per year.
Norway: 8,5 flights per person, per year.
Denmark: 6,2 flights per person, per year.
Finland: 4,4 flights per person, per year.
Sweden: 4,4 flights per person, per year.
The passenger numbers correlates relatively well with detected cases when the pandemi hit the Nordic Countries (chose March 4th, arbitrarily); Sweden and Denmark changes place:
====
Iceland – March 4, 1]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 26 cases
Population-size adjusted, up to the size of Sweden (biggest country): 730 cases
====
Norway – March 4, 2]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 59 cases
Population-size adjusted: 109
====
Sweden – March 4, 3]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 52 cases
(Not Population-size adjusted)
====
Denmark – March 4, 4]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 14 cases
Population-size adjusted: 25
====
Finland – March 4, 5]:
Coronavirus cases detected: 7 cases
Population-size adjusted: 13
====
So when this awful pandemi is over, I think it is important to study all aspects of what happened in each country before one draws firm conclusions. And LEARN from the good stuff, and do more of that! :-)
They took a long time to decide it was a national priority. At the point when Korea started heavily ramping up its testing program, most Western countries took roughly the same approach they took during SARS, where they contact traced and tested only the few cases they knew about with the expectation that'd be enough.
I am unable to find any reliable data that shows the ramp up of testing capacity after deciding its a national priority by country. What is the basis for 'similarly quickly' ?
Sibling comment to your original comment seems to suggest US wasn't able to 'similarly quickly' due to lack of onsite manufacturing.
Even the article suggests this,
> The country was testing people for the virus at the fastest pace in the world
I can't find the data off the top of my head, but in the middle of March the US was able to ramp up from barely 1k tests a day to 100k within a week or two. It's my understanding that Germany went comparably fast.
"Korean officials enacted a key reform, allowing the government to give near-instantaneous approval to testing systems in an emergency. Within weeks of the current outbreak in Wuhan, China, four Korean companies had manufactured tests from a World Health Organization recipe and, as a result, the country quickly had a system that could assess 10,000 people a day."
Before the virus affected anyone in Korea the president brought together many heads of industry, and ramped up masks/testing/essential item production.
