Korea's Early COVID-19 Response: Findings and Implications.

Soon-Gwan Chung,Shin-Kue Ryu

doi:10.3390/ijerph18168316

Abstract

South Korea was a hotspot of the COVID-19 pandemic with confirmed infections quickly surpassing 10,000 people. However, the country quickly responded and contained additional infections with minimal costs of lives. Hence, the question, “what did they do differently?” Building on empirical fingerprints from over 1507 pages of South Korean government press briefings on their public sector response between 31 January 2020 and 1 July 2020, we capture the sufficiency-based mechanism in operation with two key findings. First, mechanisms matter in pandemic containment, i.e., sequence, complementary activities, and systematic settings are consequential to the witnessed outcome. Second, central government-led efforts were effective and in parts necessary to deal with invisible and rapidly spreading infections beyond a single jurisdictional boundary. These findings lead to a timely discussion on whether pandemics should be treated in the same scholarly limelight as other natural disasters.

Highlights

Due to China’s geographical proximity and its status as the largest trading partner, the South Korean Government was on high alert over the possibility that China’s reported
By containing the rise of mass infections, the country moved down the international ranking of COVID-19 infections [6]
The temporal boundaries are appropriate as they encapsulate the chronological developments of outbreak and containment as evidenced in Figure 1 and Table 1

Summary

Introduction

Due to China’s geographical proximity and its status as the largest trading partner, the South Korean Government was on high alert over the possibility that China’s reportedCoronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) may travel over into the country [1]. Despite being aware of the risk, South Korea was not immune to its spread into its borders. By February 2020, South Korea had the second most reported COVID-19 cases in the world outside of China with cumulative infection cases in thousands [5]. By containing the rise of mass infections, the country moved down the international ranking of COVID-19 infections [6].

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion