The secret behind South Korea’s Covid success

At the start of the pandemic, the situation in care homes looked particularly grim. One report on 19 March said: ‘Experts warn that hundreds of substandard long-term care facilities could serve as hotbeds for the contagious coronavirus.’ The alert came not from Wiltshire or Manchester, but from Park Chan-kyong, Seoul correspondent of the South China Morning Post. There was real fear that the residents of the city’s care homes would become victims of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet three months on, South Korea as a whole — let alone its care homes — has suffered fewer than 300 deaths nationwide. The world is asking: how?

Things have looked slightly worse recently — 49 new cases discovered last week — but this is nothing in comparison with Europe. Rather than imposing total lockdown, South Korea closed some schools and the rest of the country carried on. We’ve seen plenty of coverage on all this, along with its test and trace policy using mobile phone apps to identify and eliminate disease hotspots.