How South Korea kept its infection rate down
New laws after Mers outbreak allowed government to collect data and footage on the infected
WITH the establishment of the Covid19 Information Centre at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research keeping track of and identifying infection hot spots in tandem with cellphone companies to enable contact tracing, what implications does this have on South Africans’ privacy and will it work?
President Cyril Ramaphosa was clear about the approach the country is taking when he addressed the nation about the extended lockdown and why. He said: “We are learning both from the experiences of other countries and from the evidence we now have about the development of the pandemic in South Africa.”
The three-part strategy is to intensify public health response to reduce the speed of infections, introduce economic support programmes for affected businesses and citizens and increase social support to protect the poor and vulnerable.
The intensification of public health as a response to reduce infections is to screen and test those in hospitals and communities.
The Covid-19 Information Centre will keep the data on screening, testing, isolation and hospitalisation. The data will be used to identify infection hot spots and who the infected people have come into contact with, in order to focus resources where needed.
Ramaphosa has spoken about contract tracing. What is it? How does it work? Will it work?
The fact that South Africa is using evidence from other countries that have contained the pandemic and learning from those that have not, points us to South Korea to explain contact tracing and how it works.
On February 17, South Korea had 30 confirmed cases. By February 29, it had 3 150 and by April 13, 10 537. South Korea had been on its way to becoming one of the highest infected countries.
Dr Kim Woo Joo of the Korea University Guro Hospital said the country learnt from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (Mers-CoV) outbreak in 2015. “(The) first one is diagnostic test, it’s very essential. We developed a lot of diagnostic tests and distributed (them) in every hospital.”
South Korea contained the outbreak and developed a concise response to identify human-to-human transmission and surface transmission which was turned into law. The Mers outbreak ended in the same year it began, 2015.
On February 17 when there were only 30 cases, the government began developing thousands of tests that were distributed to public and private hospitals which joined forces. The tests were mainly free. Six-hundred locations provided Covid-19 screening at a rate of 20 000 a day.
They labelled one positive case as patient 31. Tracked her movements to a church service she went to, then identified those who she came into contact with and tested them. Those who tested positive were isolated and treated in their home or a government dedicated facility. The process repeated itself over again, and is what is known as contact tracing.
The laws implemented after the Mers outbreak allowed the government to collect data and security footage of those who tested positive, in order to identify where they went and what they touched. It tested individuals who were in the infected path, and begin contact tracing once more. This allowed the government to track Covid-19’s movement.
All the data of paths where the infected travelled was shared with the public to alert them to stay away from the area. It was compiled onto websites and apps. The government even sends text messages if you were near where there were confirmed cases. There was no need for a lockdown.
Despite it being a violation of their privacy, the country has a homogeneous culture with shared interests. Where they view public health trumping privacy in an outbreak.
Jun Eun-Kyeong, of the Korea Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, said: “Since the disease can infect others… public interests tend to be emphasised more than human rights.”
This highlights several imperative components that allowed the country to perform such a mammoth task – from having adequate infrastructure and resources, shared values, and an ability to execute. It also highlights that its citizen’s location data is being collected, irrespective of infection, as well as visual evidence in the form of video footage, along with facial recognition software.
The South African government seems to be following a similar route. What about our privacy? Who will have access to it. For how long?
Kate O’Regan, a Covid-19 judge, in an interview with eNCA on April 12, acknowledges that privacy rights are implicated by cellphone companies communicating your location data to the government. Yet that privacy is not absolute.
“And here one of the most important reasons for limiting privacy rights is another right in the Constitution, which is the right to access to health care… if the pandemic is out of control… then all of our rights of access to health care are going to be threatened. It’s in those circumstances, and it’s not unusual, where two rights come in conflict. Where you need to try and build a system which protects both of them to the greatest extent possible.”
O’Regan explains the safeguards, which mainly includes the creation of a dedicated judge, the sunset clause outlining how data collection has to end when the country is not in a state of disaster anymore, and the assurance that those whose information is collected will be informed.
Minister of Communications, Telecommunications and Postal Services Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, echoed the sentiments: “If tomorrow President Cyril Ramaphosa says we are doing away with the national disaster (declaration) and we are going back to our normal lives, they cease to exist and the data must be deleted.”
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