South Korea listened to the experts
| Eyes of World |
On April 8, CNN, the U.S. news media, described how Korea has succeeded in curbing the spread of COVID-19, unlike the U.S. and Britain, and reported that South Korea actively accepted experts’ opinions to cope with COVID-19, and eventually put the virus under control.
South Korea, the US and the UK all reported their first Covid-19 cases around the same time: on January 20, January 21, and January 31, respectively. How things unfolded from there, unfortunately for the US and UK, has been strikingly different.
Today, South Korea is reporting less than 100 new cases a day, the UK is reporting around 4,000 new cases a day, and the US is reporting around 30,000. But while numbers in South Korea have fallen, in the US and UK they have been rising exponentially.
The great success story is South Korea, and we know how they did it: they tested.
By February 4, Kogene Biotech of Seoul had not only developed one but had also had it approved by the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC). And by February 10, was reporting its findings on the first 2,776 people to have been tested.
At that point, there were only 27 confirmed cases in South Korea, so — in another impressive demonstration of speed — the South Korean authorities tested each of them and, more importantly, isolated those who tested positive and monitored their contacts.
Initially, the authorities were swamped by the numbers of people who needed testing, but South Korean officials have tested contacts of those who have been infected. The authorities have made tests freely available and set up drive-in stations, modeled on McDonald’s and Starbucks for anyone to use. Those who tested positive were then isolated, with the result that the epidemic was swiftly controlled without the country as a whole needing to be shut down.
On January 30, President Moon was saying that preventative “measures should be strong enough to the point of being considered excessive.” South Korea was sensitive to the dangers of the virus because of the country’s experience with SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, which spread in 2002 and 2003) and MERS (the Middle East respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus of the 2015 South Korean outbreak).