Whats Behind South Koreas COVID-19 Exceptionalism? – The Atlantic

Yascha Mounk: No testing, no treatment, no herd immunity, no easy way out

In late January, just one week after the countrys first case was diagnosed, government officials urged medical companies to develop coronavirus test kits and told manufacturers to prepare for mass production. By mid-Februarywhile the U.K. was talking about herd immunity and President Donald Trump was predicting that the virus would miraculously disappear in weeksSouth Korea was churning out thousands of test kits every day. By March 5, South Korea had tested 145,000 peoplemore than the U.S., the U.K., France, Italy, and Japan combined.

To spare hospitals from being overrun with patients, as they were in 2015, Korean officials opened 600 testing centers and pioneered the use of drive-through testing stations to reduce face-to-face contact indoors. Inspired by drive-through counters at fast-food restaurants, these pop-up centers offered patients 10-minute tests without forcing them to leave their cars.

In most countries, contact tracingor, simply, tracingrefers to the practice of interviewing recent patients to learn where, when, and to whom they might have passed along the disease. South Korea combines that approach with high-tech surveillance made possible by the post-MERS legislation mentioned above.

Read: Would you sacrifice your privacy to get out of quarantine?

The way Seoul does it is, theyll send out an alert saying that there were X number of new confirmed cases today, if any, and that you can check their routes on the district website, Yung In Chae, a writer based in Seoul, told me in an email. On the website, each patient is identified [by] their gender and their age. They also note, with asterisks, whether their houses have been disinfected, whether there were contacts, and whether they were wearing masks the entire time. Lately, most of our cases have been imported, so the routes are pretty boring: People are going from the airport, to quarantine in their house, to their community health center to get tested.

This level of surveillance might alarm some Americans. But, again, its important to consider South Koreas response in the context of the MERS outbreak. In 2015, the governments most public failure was its refusal to share any information about the hospitals where sick patients might have visited. In 2020, South Koreans seem mindful of the trade-offs between privacy and public health, and the sources I spoke with welcomed tracing technology. Im fine with the amount of information shared, Yung In Chae said. I think that weve figured out a good balance between guarding privacy and public health.

Follow this link:

Whats Behind South Koreas COVID-19 Exceptionalism? - The Atlantic