Last week, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said Ireland was following the South Korean model for tackling the coronavirus outbreak. South Korea has been lauded internationally for managing to significantly slow the number of new cases of the virus, despite an early spike.

“After MERS the government put together a national infectious diseases control act” says Dr Jerome Kim, who is Director General of the International Vaccine Institute based in Seoul. The legislation, he says, “allows for the government to track people, and for the tracking information to be posted online, so that people would know if they’d passed through a certain subway station at a certain time that they might consider themselves exposed, and might consider getting tested if they develop symptoms.“

Professor Gye Cheol Kwon, the chairman of the Laboratory Medicine Foundation said many things have worked in combination to make South Korea’s strategy a success. “Early patient detection, followed by isolation and contact tracing have been important,” he says.

The country recently started screening visitors from overseas, meaning that you must undergo a test on arrival into the country. “They screen you when you come through the airport. They put you in a holding facility which is like a hotel room, and the next day they tell you your result.

The use of face masks is also widespread in South Korea. Professor Gye Cheol Kwon says mask wearing is encouraged in Korea, primarily because it is such a crowded country, and infection could spread rapidly.

“The government’s messaging has to be perfectly clear. There can’t be contradictory messages, these only confuse people. The government has to be transparent, to explain what it’s doing.”

”As the number of new cases has dropped, they noticed that the greater number of new cases was coming from outside of Korea, and that’s when they started screening people from outside. They used the data and acted on it.“