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What We Can Learn From South Korea’s Coronavirus Response
The country learned tough lessons from the MERS pandemic, and it’s paying off now
South Korea and the United States identified their first cases of Covid-19 around the same time, in mid-to-late January. But while case counts exploded and are still high in many parts of the U.S., South Korea quickly stanched the infection’s spread without forcible lockdowns or an economic shutdown. The country is still seeing hotspots of infection, including recent outbreaks at a nightclub and an industrial warehouse, but its per-capita deaths and its economic contraction have been among the world’s lowest.
Preparedness
Some have suggested luck has a lot to do with South Korea’s comparatively successful coronavirus response: Less than a month before the country identified its first case of Covid-19, it had completed a tabletop exercise on emergency preparedness for a viral pneumonia, and its first cluster of cases was among young, relatively invulnerable attendees of a single church.
But if South Korea’s success is attributable to luck, it’s mostly in the sense that luck favors the prepared. When learning of the details of the country’s pandemic response, “I was most impressed by two things that happened before Covid,” says…
