Electric vehicle in South Korean underground parking spontaneously combusts, eight hour fire destroys vehicles, causes building evacuations for hundreds

 It took just seconds for an underground South Korean residential parking lot to be engulfed in flames. The culprit: a Mercedes-Benz EQE electric vehicle that hadn’t been charging. 

The blaze incinerated dozens of cars nearby, scorched a further 100 vehicles and forced hundreds of residents to emergency shelters as the buildings above the parking lot lost power and electricity. Nobody died, but the fire took eight hours to extinguish. ...

The country had already been on edge about battery-related fires, after a blaze at a lithium-battery factory in late June that killed nearly two dozen people. The Mercedes EV blaze, in the port city of Incheon, occurred last week. Then, on Tuesday, a Kia EV6 caught fire in a parking lot in a central South Korean town.

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In the good old days the Republican fascists funded domestic companies, now the Democrat fascists fund the foreign companies

 Taiwan last week, South Korea this week.

The Biden administration has reached an agreement to provide up to $6.4 billion in direct funding for Samsung Electronics to develop a computer chip manufacturing and research cluster in Texas.

The funding announced Monday by the Commerce Department is part of a total investment in the cluster that, with private money, is expected to exceed $40 billion. The government support comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in 2022 with the goal of reviving the production of advanced computer chips domestically.

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The pest in North Korea is becoming more problematic

South Korean defense officials said the missile fired on Saturday appeared to have been launched from an actual submarine, unlike some tested in the past, which were believed to have been fired from underwater platforms. North Korea has only one known submarine capable of launching a ballistic missile, with a single launch tube, but it has been developing a new one with greater capabilities, according to the South Korean military.

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This headline from The New York Daily News about South Korea is just shameless exaggeration, pure COVID porn

South Korea

South Korea sees deadliest day of pandemic after attempt to return to normalcy

 

Daily new COVID-19 cases per million fell 62% in South Korea in the two months before vaccination began on Feb 25, and rose 70% in the two months after

South Korea, which has 7.2% of its population vaccinated with at least one dose, uses the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on its frontline medical workers and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on the more numerous population in the long-term care arena: 

By the end of March, authorities plan to complete injecting the first doses to some 344,000 residents and workers at long-term care settings, who will receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, and 55,000 frontline medical workers, who will receive shots developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.

COVID-19 cases fell without the aid of vaccines in South Korea, and rose again despite them.

Since vaccination began on Feb 25, deaths per million stands today only where it was when the effort first began two and a half months ago.

vaccination

cases

deaths

It still amazes me that I actually thought in March 2020 that the US and South Korea would travel similar pandemic trajectories

South Korea is an open society. It's not a lie like China.

Just look at this outcome. 

We are so pathetic.

Two months ago, on the morning of March 10, Michigan still had zero cases of SARS-CoV-2

Today, May 10, Michigan has 46,756 cases and 4,526 deaths.

The case fatality rate of 9.68% is the highest in the nation.

In my county of Kent, barely 21% of the cases are Caucasian. By far Hispanic or Latino people have the most infections at over 35%, with African Americans having fewer cases than whites at 19.5%. Asians have fewer than 8% of total infections.

Frankly when I began posting about this in late January after following the news in China quietly for a few weeks prior to that I never imagined we'd be in this situation.

I felt certain America's health care system was too robust to let it happen.

Boy was I wrong. 

15% of those tested in the US have turned up positive so far, and of those 5.9% have died. Mind you, the average flu season in the US sees 8% of the population estimated to have been infected, with just 0.1% dying.

South Korea, on which I had hung my hopes as the proper comparison, has had just 1.6% test positive so far, with just 2.3% dying.

It's infection rate came way down from the 4.7% which obtained in early March because it employed extensive testing, quarantining (using phone apps to track, and gps wrist bracelets where necessary for scofflaws) and contact tracing. In other words, South Korea acted like Big Brother if you are an American libertarian.

South Korea's mortality rate came up dramatically from the 0.6% which obtained in early March, but of course it was still early in the outbreak. Needless to say, America's current rate of death at 5.9% is still 156% higher than South Korea's, despite the massive rise from 0.6%.

Cases in South Korea stubbornly remain below 11,000 in a country of 52 million (.02/million) because it determined to stop the spread.

In the USA we have .4/million and climbing (1900% more) because we are not a serious country.

We are a country filled with and run by childish people whose disregard for the health care system resembles nothing so much as the disobedient child's interminable disregard for a parent who never disciplines it.

Guess what? SARS-CoV-2 is coming for you. The beating will continue until morale improves.

South Korea today has 0.0002 confirmed coronavirus cases per million population, America has 0.0033, 16.5x as many

South Korea's first coronavirus infection was reported on the same day as America's first infection, but South Korea practiced strict quarantine of infected people, contact tracing, widespread testing, mask-wearing and social distancing, without locking down its economy.

America did only the social distancing part after it was already too late, and then a hodge-podge of lockdowns with that.

As a result, South Korea has almost 11,000 confirmed cases today, but America has almost 1.1 million, 100x as many.

As for deaths, South Korea has 0.0000047 per million, the US 0.0001935 per million, 41x as many.

Year over year in 1Q2020, South Korean GDP actually grew by 1.3% vs. just 0.3% for GDP in the United States (BEA Table 6), 4.3x better.

South Korea has had far fewer cases of the disease, far fewer deaths and a much better economic outcome than in the United States because it wisely understood that what it had to do wasn't an existential threat to liberty.

USA coronavirus mortality rate vs. South Korea and Taiwan 4/23/20

USA             5.66%
South Korea 2.24%
Taiwan         1.40%

South Koreans remain the safest from coronavirus, followed by the Germans, Americans . . . not so much

Here's the 2020 herd immunity paraprosdokian I thought I would never hear but did

We have to infect the entire population with the coronavirus in order to save it from the COVID-19 disease.

A few voices are actually saying this right now, mostly on "conservative" talk radio. You know who I mean.

England was going to pursue this policy until they realized just how many people would have to die.

Consider what this would mean in the US.

Let's take the South Korean mortality rate, which right now is 1.7% after 6 weeks with no new cases reported today (the US is currently at 2.7% after 4 weeks). Say half the population gets exposed because we give up, go back to work and carry on: 165 million get exposed @ 1.7% means 2.8 million deaths.

Mark Levin was poo-poohing such a catastrophe on his show tonight, like it's not even a possibility, as he rattled off the deaths annually from our wars, heart disease, cancer, etc.

He's wrong. They're all wrong. America is a wide open sitting duck for this disease, which spreads like a cold but kills like the flu. We have the most cases in the world already, by far, 276,965. Flu doesn't spread the way coronavirus does. Not everyone gets the flu. 30 million flu cases is typical, with 30,000 deaths, that's it, in a completely free and open society. But everyone gets a cold. Everyone. And that's the problem. A high morbidity rate.

Fortunately 3/4 of those surveyed think stopping this coronavirus is job one, not saving the economy.

Yes, this will be catastrophic for the economy. It already is. But we've had economic catastrophe before and we know how to rebuild.

The important thing right now is for the government to rescue people, not companies, and buy us some time so that the people actually saving us in the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and succumb. Without Americans there will be no America.

Conserve that. 

The real reason Trump & Co. didn't want you to panic

To avoid the Federal Reserve Bank having to intervene to rescue the economy, that's why. But, too late.

The Fed dropped its benchmark interest rate to 0% this afternoon and will restart QE with $700 billion in Treasury and mortgage security purchases. It knows tomorrow is going to be rough.

The reason isn't to boost the stock market, though there is no doubt they hope that would be a happy by-product of their action.

Because economic activity has dived with all the cancellation going on in order to stop the virus from spreading, there is extreme pressure on overnight funding markets which businesses use to fund their operations. Their income has tanked but they still have bills to pay. Borrowing in the funding markets is critical for the survival of far too many companies. The addition of so many more entities having to go to the funding markets than is usual, and in larger quantity, under these new and dire circumstances means money markets will not have enough liquidity to meet these new demands. So, the Fed will step in to keep things well lubricated.

That's it.

This could have been avoided if Trump had simply shutdown the country on Feb 1 like Xi Jinping shutdown Hubei on Jan 23. China is over the hump on the epidemic there because it acted early to contain the infection. We are just getting started, and unfortunately we are looking more like Italy than South Korea. The virus was still capable of being isolated here on Feb 1. Since then it has spread everywhere because we foolishly permitted travelers to come and go, creating hot zones everywhere. Now it's payback time.

This is going to be really ugly unless Trump acts immediately to do what Fauci wants, which is a 14-day shutdown. People need to shelter in place for a few weeks.

You won't care about an economy in flames if you can't breathe because a killer pneumonia has you gasping for breath.

Death rate from COVID-19 remains a catastrophe in Italy, China and Iran less so if you can believe them, USA France and Spain form another group, South Korea Switzerland and Germany all are under 1%

The USA is, unfortunately, not looking more like South Korea.

If the USA gets 30 million COVID-19 cases, a mortality rate of 2.15% translates into 645,000 deaths, 21.5 times the number who die from flu in an average year with 30 million influenza cases (mortality rate of 0.1%).

There is reason to think this epidemic might result in just 100,000 deaths or so in the US at the very worst

And probably a lot fewer.

The US is too robust compared with places like China and Iran to descend into their chaos, but South Korea's can-do spirit in the face of this epidemic reminds me of nothing so much as Yankee ingenuity. If the bureaucracy in the US can be tamed, we may well have an experience similar to South Korea's.

Unfortunately, the mortality rate for COVID-19 in South Korea has suddenly rebounded to 0.60%

Here.

The mortality rate from COVID-19 has already dropped from 0.54% to 0.48% in South Korea

Here.

If you want to know how COVID-19 is going to go, watch South Korea, they are doing just about everything right

Update 5/12/25:

COVID-19 deaths per million of population in South Korea stand at 694 vs. 3,727 in the United States.

South Korea's 2.5 million population city of Daegu in a panic over coronavirus superspreader at a church

Korea’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) reported 53 new cases of the virus on Thursday, following 20 a day earlier, taking the total across the country to 104. Of that national tally, 70 patients are from Daegu or nearby and the majority have been traced to an infected 61-year-old woman known as “Patient 31” who attended a church, a scenario that KCDC described as a “super-spreading event”. ... Daegu Mayor Kwon Young-jin told residents to stay indoors as he warned of likely further cases. ... Kwon cautioned that at least 90 more of the about 1,000 other people who attended services at the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony were also showing symptoms. 

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South Korea reported its first death from coronavirus Thursday

South Korea reported its first death from the coronavirus on Thursday. The country’s Center for Disease Control (KCDC) reported 22 new confirmed cases of the virus, with the deceased among that number. The cause of death is under investigation. - Holly Ellyatt

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Reported separately:

The Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention said the 63-year-old victim, who died Wednesday from pneumonia, had been bedridden for more than 20 years at a hospital in southeastern city of Cheongdo.

Your income under the free trade reality has allowed you to buy some cheap clothes from South Asia, make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and eat it behind the wheel of your new little South Korean shit box in the apartment complex parking lot