The South Korean Success Story in the Making: How Widespread Testing Beat COVID”

By: Abraham Paik

62,918

Sixty two thousand nine hundred eighteen.

According to the Center for Disease Control’s daily updates, 62,918 Americans officially contracted COVID-19 on July 11th alone. 

44

According to World Meter’s daily updates, 44 South Koreans officially contracted COVID-19 on July 12th alone. 

The difference is clear. One number shows the utter failure of a response to the coronavirus pandemic, while the other number shows the exact opposite - a successful response.

The difference? In one word: testing.

South Korea’s Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-Wha called testing “the key behind [South Korea’s] very low fatality rate” in a statement to the BBC in March of this year. She continues that widespread testing is crucial because it leads to early detection, allowing isolation to minimize further spread. 

Indeed, Raina MacIntyre, an infectious disease scholar at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, describes that “diagnostic capacity at scale is key to epidemic control,” in an interview with American Association for the Advancement of Science also in March. 

Every other facet of South Korea’s response, whether it be their thorough tracing or strict isolation, is enabled by the widespread testing in the country. Put simply, South Korea can’t trace the interactions of a sick individual, nor instruct them to quarantine, if they don’t know the individual is sick in the first place. 

South Korea’s testing is the definition of expansive. Max Fisher reported for the New York Times that South Korea, as of late March, has tested over 300,000 individuals for COVID-19, and produces up to 100,000 test kits a day for domestic use and exports to 17 foreign governments. To spare hospitals from being overwhelmed by people seeking tests, the government set up 600 testing centers aimed at mass screening as many people as possible, while protecting healthcare workers through minimal contact. 

South Korea even established 50 drive through stations where patients are tested in just 10 minutes while never leaving their car, as a way of maximizing convenience while minimizing contact. 

How did they get there? The story starts with the 2015 outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, in South Korea. Stephen Engelberg explains in an article for ProPublica Magazine earlier this year that the MERS outbreak stalled the South Korean economy while killing 38 people along the way. 

Afterwards, however, South Korea took a hard look at what went wrong - a lack of accurate tests lead to infected individuals spreading the disease from hospital to hospital whilst seeking care.

As Derek Thompson describes in an article for the Atlantic in May that South Korea learned that flattening the curve of any hyper-infectious disease requires “an accelerated plan for designing, manufacturing, and distributing accurate tests”

As a result, Engelberg explains, “Korean officials enacted a key reform [following MERS], allowing the government to give near-instantaneous approval to testing systems in an emergency.” 

For South Korea’s COVID response, this rapid approval for testing made all the difference. Within weeks of the outbreak spreading in Wuhan, four Korean companies had used the World Health Organization’s blueprint for testing kits and began mass manufacturing tests, quickly allowing South Korea to test 10,000 people a day. 

To put it simply, South Korea learned from its mistakes. They identified a problem and fixed it, and, when faced with something similar down the road, they were ready.