How South Korea conquered Covid-19
It’s impossible not to admire how effectively South Korea has handled the Covid-19 pandemic, said Donald Kirk in The Korea Times (Seoul). Three months on from the country’s first case on 20 January, it has recorded fewer than 11,000 cases and just 240 deaths. Its case fatality rate – 2.27% – is one of the lowest in the world, and new daily cases don’t reach double digits. What’s more, it’s all been done without the need for a strict lockdown. Mandated social distancing measures – which are due to be lifted on 5 May – were limited to the closure of schools and museums and a ban on large gatherings. “Stores are open, factories are humming and people are still riding buses and subways.” Having stopped the virus “in its tracks”, they’ve even managed to hold national elections.
The country’s success is largely down to the speed with which it acted, said Victor Cha in Foreign Affairs (New York). Within two weeks of its first case, it had set up a hotline to update the public and collect data, and sent 700,000 face masks to workplaces. Crucially, it had also approved and distributed test kits which produced results within six hours. By mid-March, it had tested 270,000 people – with South Korean companies now producing 350,000 tests a day. This was supplemented by aggressive contact tracing: movements of people with the virus were tracked by GPS phone technology, surveillance camera data and credit card activity, with detailed real-time alerts issued to those they’d come into contact with. Such intrusion would be anathema to many in the West, said David Lee in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong). But South Korea was stung by its experience of the 2015 Mers epidemic, when one case quickly led to 186 infections and 38 deaths. A recent Seoul University study found 78.5% of the population would sacrifice their privacy to stop a pandemic.
President Moon Jae-in’s popularity surged off the back of his country’s handling of the crisis, said Robert J. Fouser in The Korea Herald (Seoul). So it’s no surprise that voters – who queued one metre apart to vote during April’s election – rewarded his ruling Democratic Party with the biggest majority won by any party since South Korea’s transition to democracy in 1987. But trouble lies ahead, said Andrew Salmon in the Asia Times (Hong Kong). With South Korea so reliant on global export giants such as Samsung and LG to drive its growth, the country faces a “mountainous” challenge to avoid the coming economic contagion as successfully as it has done the virus itself.