International perspective on Covid-19 fight

Sir, – There has been a large amount of media coverage of coronavirus in the UK around the handling of same.

However I have not seen anything about what is happening to prevent further cases coming into the UK.

The UK Government has known since January that coronavirus was a problem and did nothing to stop cases coming in, either by air travel or through ferry ports.

So now there is a full-scale epidemic which cannot readily be contained.

As someone who lives in the Far East (Korea) what has been happening here should be of some relevance.

Taiwan has probably been the best at dealing with the outbreak by closing contact with China at an early stage and imposing a strong airport testing regime.

In Korea the government did not close travel to or from China, hence a large influx of cases.

Korea now has strong testing facilities at the main airports and, with the situation within the country under control, the number of daily cases found at the airports are often the largest amount.

In this country the outbreak has been centred on Taegu, initially through a Christian group with links to Wuhan, and the adjoining province.

Significant numbers of cases are in Seoul and the adjoining province.

There are not so many cases in the rest of the country.

I believe the UK has no testing of incoming passengers into the country so there will be cases coming in to the UK daily which will make matters even worse than they are currently.

Hence airport/ferry port testing should really be introduced to cover incoming cases.

Korea for some time was the number two country in number of cases and subject to some international criticism, but is now down to 14 as the health service has really got a hold of the situation having handled 390,000 cases for testing.

It is a figure the UK would have difficulty matching. John McKay. Busan, South Korea.