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What South Korea Got Right
And what the rest of the world can learn
As Mark Roser, founder and editor of Our World in Data, shared on Twitter this morning, “South Korea shows what is possible.”
“It seems to me that the most important question right now is to find out what Korea did well and learn from them,” he adds. The graphic he shared—also in this post—shows how well the country has been able to bring down cases and deaths.
“It isn’t the case that Korea got it right from the start,” Roser said. “Korea had an outbreak very early. When Korea had close to 1,000 daily cases others were still below 10. But while Korea was able to bring down the number of cases, others were not.”
What has South Korea done especially well? For one: The country has one of the most well-organized testing programs and has made efforts to quickly isolate people with infections and trace and quarantine people they’ve come in contact with.
Thanks to a volunteer group called the COVID Translate Project, English-speakers can now read the The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s playbook. It’s an unofficial translation, you can read more about it here. The group says they plan to release a more updated and extensive version on Monday, as well as translations in Spanish, French, and more. Here’s a summary graph from the report on coronavirus management strategy:
If you don’t want to dig into the translated playbook, below is a reader-friendly Medium post about the paper (recommended by COVID Translate Project organizers).
