South Korea Response

There are countries and areas which took early action regarding the coronavirus and, to date, have been successful in preventing it from getting a foothold, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong.  There are countries which have reacted slowly and we are seeing the results, primarily in Europe, and the United States may also end up in that category.

China took late, and draconian, actions mostly impossible for many other countries, including ours, to replicate.

There is only one country where the illness began to take off but which seems to have substantially slowed the growth rate of new cases and that is South Korea.  As of this morning it has 8,086 with only 107 added in the past 24 hours.



Below is a summary from another source of the actions that country has taken, along with some fortunate circumstances that have helped.  Even with that, and with a younger profile and lower risk profile of active cases, the death rate is currently at 0.9% which is nine times higher than the rate for the average flu season and five times the rate the U.S. had during its most serious recent flu season (2017-18).

Public health measures carried out. South Korea has a population of 50 million compared to 330 million in the U.S.

• over 200,000 tests carried out since testing started; the capacity to do 20,000 tests/day with 6-24 hour turnaround times
• the innovation of drive-through test centers
• swift deployment of telephone consulting services and thermal cameras set up in buildings and public places to detect fever
• dedicated centers and hospitals centralize specialized equipment and personnel, while keeping the virus out of regular hospitals

Measures after infections exploded on the third week of Feb (from fewer than 60 on Feb 19 to 3150 by Feb 29), because of a chain of infections related to crowded services by a Christian sect, the Shincheonji:

• widespread testing of the church’s 211,000 followers – priority testing on those w/ symptoms; then testing on those who were asymptomatic to ensure they weren’t latent carriers; description from a public official, “very aggressive case isolation & case tracking”
• helped by the cooperation of a highly centralized religious organization w/c was able to provide the location of its facilities and the personal information of its members
• case tracking via CCTV data mining and credit use patterns

The good luck:

• By coincidence, on Dec 2019 public health officials did a “table-top exercise” on a coronavirus outbreak
• the sect Shincheonji targets Koreans in their 20s and 30s, so the explosion from less than a hundred to more than 3,000 occurred among a less vulnerable segment of the population

Young people may not fall gravely ill and be less vulnerable, but they can clearly spread the virus to those who are vulnerable.

Addendum: It was precisely the South Korean government’s aggressive public health effort that enabled them to keep their cities open, including Daegu, the worst-hit by the virus and thus avoid the lockdowns China and Italy have had to impose.