People can be contagious before symptoms. And that’s also a very different strategy than testing everyone before they go into work each day. You’ll miss the vast majority of people if you just test people with symptoms.
Neither country took the middle ground compared to where the US was when we finally started reacting.
South Korea has been aggressively testing, contact chasing, and quarantining from day 1. Look at their number of tests per capita compared to ours.
China did indeed shut down the entire economy for months for provinces containing 900M people iirc. In barely hit provinces they have teams of thousands of people doing aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine.
The number of new cases in South Korea has started to increase again, and they keep getting new clusters unlinked to any known cases: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-southko... I suspect that they're going to have to give up on the tracing and testing approach in the next few weeks.
Stopping every transmission isn’t necessary. We just need some way to drive R < 1.
China’s approach (lots of temperature taking, testing everyone with a fever) might not eradicate the disease here, but it could keep it manageable until a vaccine is deployed.
