Is South Korea A Good Example for U.S. Coronavirus Prevention Efforts?

I have noticed more articles in the U.S. media highlighting South Korea’s success testing for the coronavirus:

Dr. Ogan Gurel, who got his medical degree from Columbia in New York and moved to Seoul 10 years ago, cites drive-by testing as one of “a panoply of measures” designed to stop the virus from overwhelming this country of 51 million people.

“There is no silver bullet,” says Gurel, who teaches medicine and provides scientific advice. “Individually, people might suffer, but in aggregate they end up with qualitative stabilization.” That is to say, for the overall population the disease is brought under control.

The proof is in the numbers showing new cases in South Korea decreasing steadily–just 110 on Thursday, the lowest in more than two weeks, while 177 were declared cured and sent home. All told, the number of cases totals 7,979, but the general feeling sense is the worst is over.

“Korea is setting a good example for the U.S.,” said Jang Sung-eun, who still rides the subways to work every day while many of her colleagues try to work from home. “They say we Koreans are rather effective in dealing with the problem.”

Such guarded optimism reflects a discernible shift in national mood from the near-panic that engulfed the country after the virus was discovered to be emanating from a church in the city of Daegu, 170 miles southeast of Seoul. The church was one of dozens run by the secretive Shincheonji sect, whose leader, Lee Man-hee, has proclaimed himself the embodiment of Jesus Christ.

“There was some resistance among them to testing,” says Gurel, but by now almost all the sect’s 230,000 members have been checked. Most of those suffering from the disease were members of the church or caught the virus from members who may have passed it on through two or three others, who in turn transmitted it to still more contacts.

Korean self-discipline and community cohesiveness explain much of the success in coming to terms with an illness that remains almost out of control elsewhere.

Daily Beast

You can read more at the link, but these articles don’t mention how travel from China was not restricted which helped the spread of the virus in South Korea. Likewise it took time for South Korea to get their testing and quarantine strategy in place after the initial shock of the mass infections in Daegu.

The U.S. is now experiencing the initial shock Koreans felt last month and now authorities are scrambling to implement their own testing and quarantine strategy. There is definitely best practices that can be learned from South Korea, but they will have to be adapted to deal with a far larger & diverse population, spread out over a huge landmass, with different privacy laws.