Perhaps the most pressing question of the moment is whether, and how, we can “reopen” America. Not that it’s closed, really, for much of the country remains at work, exposing them to whatever the rest of us fear as we cower in our homes. We call them “heroes” to make us feel better about free-riding off their willingness to be infected so we won’t, ignoring that they’re not necessarily doing it for us as much as doing it to keep their jobs or feed their kids.
But much of the mantra about “testing, testing, testing,” fails to connect up the nuts and bolts to what it will actually accomplish. We have no treatment, cure or vaccine at this point, which means the most it will tell us is who has it (if diagnostic tests) or had it (if antibody tests), and who was within their reach and might get it. Fair enough, but then what?
The next level of response tends to go one of two ways. The first is the “be like Sweden” path of grain herd immunity and let the weak die. The second is “be like South Korea,” which has the twin benefits of not relying on the as yet known unknown of herd immunity and, well, not so much dying. But is it possible? Michael Kim, an American in South Korea, laid it out.
As an American currently in South Korea, it’s very interesting to me the stark contrast of how different the two countries’ response to coronavirus is. I don’t think most Americans fully understand the lengths that South Korea has undergone, so I’ll try my best to explain.
1) Upon arrival, they take your temperature at the airport and ask if you’ve experienced any symptoms. If you have, they move you to a separate area and give you a coronavirus test. If you haven’t, they take you to another area and interview you. They also install ankle bracelets.
2) You are required to install an app on your phone and enable location tracking all the time. You are required to self-report symptoms in the app twice a day. If you don’t have symptoms, you need to report that too. This goes on for a period of 14 days.
If you break quarantine, you are fined $10,000 USD and face jail time. Also, they check your location on your phone frequently. My wife had her location checked 37 times in a 3 day span. And they’ve caught enterprising folks who leave their phone at home and go out.
You are assigned to a case worker who is responsible for making sure you are following all the orders. They will call you and text you to make sure you are OK. They also will send you care packages that contains a lot of food, gloves and masks, sanitary pads for women, etc.
3) If there’s a new coronavirus case in your general area (same city or district), you get a Public Safety Alert on your phone that tell you about the person (age, male/female, city) and provides updates as they receive them.
I forgot to mention that Korea also has mobilized their army to provide more operations and logistics support at the airport.
We were required to get a COVID-19 test within 3 days of arriving, which is the only activity that’s allowed to break quarantine. You have to do this in coordination with the case worker. As a family of 4, we were done testing in about 10 minutes. Test results came in 7 hours.
In response to recent public safety alerts, my family changed our plans for the next several weeks to avoid certain areas. Places with lots of traffic like Korea’s version of Walmart have temperature monitors installed so you can see everyone’s temperature.
There’s absolutely no protests or demonstrations about the anti-freedom measures or invasion of privacy. I’m not an expert in Korean politics but it seems like everyone accepts these measures as required to address this pandemic.
While we still take precautions like wearing masks in public, washing hands frequently, using hand sanitizer, etc., I feel pretty confident that the government knows everyone who has coronavirus and is tracking things very closely, which means I don’t have to worry as much.
And like some of the articles have mentioned, if you’ve been to a place where someone who has coronavirus has also visited, someone will contact you to get tested and undergo self-isolation for another 14-day period.
Will Americans acquiesce to this? Is it feasible, scalable (we’re a bit bigger and more diverse than South Korea), legal (constitutional rights implicated?) and practical? Will people who test negative be willing to accept forced quarantine for being in the proximity of some random person who tested positive for 14 days? Will they be willing to do so a second or third time? Who feeds their kids when this happens? Who does their job, runs their business, appears in court to defend their clients?
The unduly passionate seem split on the issue. There’s the unicorn take:
Why wouldn’t it be voluntary? The morally right thing to do is isolate until you’re clear after 14 days.
And then there’s the deplorable take.
Plenty of Americans who have tested positive wouldn’t do a quarantine willingly because our country churns out selfish assholes like nobody else.
On the flip side, what would happen if we adopted the South Korea $10,000 fine and a short stay in the hoosegow as an incentive for morality? Would it be acceptable to impose it on the marginalized as well as the privileged?
Once people return to the streets, and run across 100 people per day, each of whom run across 100 people per day, and so on, until a person shows symptoms, since the asymptomatic won’t attract attention, will it not have as much potential to spiral out of control as before? It’s not happening now because we’re in lockdown, masked and distanced. Can we test 330,000 people a day, week or month? Even if we can, is that the answer or does it just raise the next level of questions?
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It would be a severe infringement on our civil liberties. But then again, we would be getting care packages….
He lost me at ankle bracelet, and “case worker” sounds more like a probation officer. That whole approach would make most Americans servile, as part of a dystopian nightmare. Thankfully, that smug, authoritarian take on the COVID-19 crisis is neither feasible or legal in the U.S.
But I’m told that moral people would agree to it and only selfish assholes would not.
I reckon that the folks who came up with the Bill of Rights were a bunch of selfish assholes. They must’ve kept asking “quo warranto” when the moral people tried to impose their will.
The founders didn’t nickname it the Bill of Immoral Selfish Assholes for nothing.
I want the politicians that pass that stuff to be first through the door when they try to enforce it.
They won’t have to worry about dying from the virus as they will have a sudden case of lead poisoning.
The question is moot because the South Korean strategy is a containment strategy. Containment works when there are just a few cases in circulation. Once the cases are in the millions, it is a hopeless strategy. The disease ceases to be epidemic. It becomes endemic; it is here to stay. South Korea has an effective containment policy. New Zealand and Iceland also have successfully contained the virus. Leaving aside the mootness of whether we could do it, one must ask: How do they ever climb down from that? When and how do they normalize? The disease has become endemic for the rest of us, but is still completely novel to the populations of South Korea and New Zealand and Iceland. How do business people and tourists from South Korea and New Zealand and Iceland travel in a normal way. How do foreign business people and tourists visit them in a normal way?
Good points.
According to today,s news, they have another outbreak. So does all that stuff they are doing work? Doesn’t appear so.
The subject of many discussions in this here Hotel: people will surrender rights and liberties for the flavor of the moment or to justify a concluded end. This is the flip-side: people will invoke their rights and liberties, in a 7th-grade civics manner, to do what they want.
Locking people down works. Enforcing at by threat of arrest or at the point of a gun works better because behavior is controlled. Of course that won’t work here because we have rights and liberties not found in most other places and we insist on exercising them. We want to be on the beach, we have a right to be on the beach, so we go to the beach. “Closed, my unconstitutional ass,” we say. Beaches provide the example.
Here in the Swamp, the beaches closed, especially in Mario’s part, where all the people live on top of each other. Some reopened, but only for locals, which is constitutionally questionable. Naples, opened with instructions. They weren’t followed, so they were quickly closed.*
Getting people to comply with draconian but effective limits is hard in a place with liberties and freedoms. One must give way to the other. As lawyers, we know the temporary limitation has a way of becoming permanent. We are wary. But, no, we can’t be South Korea. It could be that our liberty and rights are detrimental in this instance.
There’s a hard balance to be made. I’m glad I’m not in control of the scales.
*Locals blamed the lack of compliance on visitors from Mario’s part of the state. The evidence was in an influx of cars with telltale county of origin tags and an influx of string bikinis. As one local said, “we don’t see many of those around here.” I am not making that up.
Apologies Skink, but I think the relevant threat is not “we will arrest you at the point of a gun”, but instead “we will put you in close proximity with a bunch of other folk who we don’t really care about and who are likely to already have the disease.”
But like all threats, it’s not likely to induce any compliance. On the other hand, it does give you a nice population to test vaccines and cures on.
We are a country that fundamentally does not care about others. We could have done this back in February, but chose not to. We could have spent the last two months preparing to do this, but we chose not to. It takes a mentality of public good over personal preference. Instead we will just let lots of people die. My country disgusts me. Almost all other countries are doing far better then us, and some with very few numbers now, and we are soaring.
You’re not big on irony, MG.
It kills me (figuratively) and others (literally) that the US, the richest and supposedly most advanced country in the world was unwilling to rise to the occasion and take the same necessary steps to control the spread of this virus that other countries are doing. Australia, Taiwan, Vietnam, New Zealand, South Korea, and others have shown the world what to do. We could have, but just instead did petty partisan bickering. It just boggles my mind and makes me very sad. History will not be kind to us.
Nor wrinkly.
Dear Mr. Greenfield
I believe there is a risk factor involved with the severe/critical cases of COVID-19 that will soon come to light. Since the 8/April/2020, I have been doing some deep and extensive researching on this. I am sure you are aware that fatality rates are higher in certain ethnicities with a male to female ratio of 60%-65% male to 40%- 35% female. The case presentations based on a “pulmonary thrombosis”. It seems my research might very well be correct. The condition is very regular and yet seemingly unknown. I will admit that I had no idea of this until 8/April/2020. At end of April, a case report came out that verified that SARS-CoV-2 virual infection would very well “set off” this condition. In the UK, a massive DNA project is now underway to check thru DNA of COVID-19 patients. They will “find” what is already known. The hurtful thing about this, is that the medical researchers should have identified this. You have my email, contact me and I will send the research to you.
Regards
Mark Brooks
Malvern
St. Elizabeth
Jamaica