The Asian Curve has at Least 3 Differences

Screen Shot 2020-03-30 at 12.24.10 PM.png — **The Curves are different…**

**Is our curve going to flatten naturally or is it a function of our actions?**

There are many similarities between our country responses. More importantly, there are at least 3 major differences between the curves of Asian countries and the rest of the world. The first was the aggressive testing enabled by their use of the WHO test recipe which was available in January. Remember, we made our own version and that delayed us by at least two months. I wrote an earlier post about that. The second is aggressive and sometimes extreme contact tracing. The third is a culture of facial masks.

We’re too late with number one. We are never willingly giving up our civil liberties and privacy for the level of contact tracing seen in China. The tradeoffs are extreme (see podcast re: Chen Qiushi). But perhaps we can still wear masks!

China: Extreme Surveillance Enables Contact Tracing

This video is worth more than any words I can muster. So please watch it and get a picture for an extreme difference. Singapore’s not too much different. South Korea had modified versions of this.

Asian Countries Have a Culture of Face Masks

Through my years of global business travel, I became quite accustomed to seeing people wearing face masks in East Asia. I don’t know if this pre-dated SARS, but that outbreak certainly had an impact in that part of the world. It was pretty normal to see people in all walks of life wearing a mask and generally it was and is still deemed socially acceptable.

Looking back, we were given a recommendation that masks wouldn’t make a difference. A driving force behind those recommendations was to prevent us from hoarding surgical and n95 masks. Unfortunately that happened anyway and our healthcare workers are in short supply of them. We have never gone back to reviewing the utility of protection for your average every day american, and the wide variety of alternatives that exist beside commercial face masks.

Aerosol transmission is one of the known modes of infection. What if wearing masks is helping reduce the transmission rate and a key contributing factor into flattening their curves? I know that we’re attempting shut downs in the US and social distancing, but people are still outside. I can see them everywhere here in San Diego. You go for a run, who knows if you just ran through someone else’s sneeze? What if they were required to wear masks while they were out? Would it make a difference?

No empirical evidence but can masks hurt?