South Korea Shows Steady Decrease in Daily COVID Cases, but Serious Hospitalizations are Up
I still believe we need to shift our thinking from COVID case counts to critical hospitalizations because the vaccines and prior infections are significantly reducing hospitalizations and deaths:
Daily COVID-19 cases fell to the three-thousand range for the first time in four weeks, but the number of critical cases remained above one-thousand for over a week.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency said Tuesday that three-thousand-865 new infections were reported throughout the previous day, raising the accumulated caseload to 615-thousand-532.
The daily figure dropped to the three-thousand range for the first time since November 30. It fell by about 340 from a day ago and over 13-hundred from a week ago. The fall is likely due to more booster shots and stepped-up social distancing rules.
However, the number of patients in serious or critical condition rose by 24 from the previous day to one-thousand-102, the second highest tally to date. The number remained above one-thousand for the eighth consecutive day.
KBS World
You can read more at the link, but when the metric of COVID effectiveness is 1,102 people in serious conditions at the hospital in a country of over 50 million it doesn’t appear to be as bad. It would be interesting to see how the 1,102 number compares to other hospitalizations such as car accidents, heart attacks, etc. to provide further context for decision makers.
The article also stated that total death is at 5,346 and that is a .87 death rate. That means people infected with COVID in South Korea have less than 1% chance of dying from the disease. Once again some useful context would be how does that percentage compare to other leading causes of death in South Korea?
What percent of COVID-19 hospitalizations in South Korea are from vaccinated vs non-vaccinated? What is the breakdown in each category by age and comorbidity?
How are these numbers different from previous years, influenza, and other respiratory illnesses?
The Gartner Group stated that making changes without valid metrics is called “tampering.”
Based on living in Korea, I don’t trust their hospitalization numbers. Minor car accidents will result in hospitalizations of 10 days. What Korea classifies as requiring “serious” hospitalization compared to other countries is highly questionable.
Flyingsword, part of that is that South Korea’s healthcare has not been driven into a ditch by insurance companies, lawyers, and bureaucrats yet. But give ’em time…
[insert hospital “war stories” here]
They can only do what we accept.