COVID-19 Contact Tracking: Why S. Korea Won

The U.S. and S. Korea found their first cases on Jan. 20, one day before we did, and suffered their first fatality on Feb. 20, nine days before we did. For the next month their COVID-19 epidemic was ahead of ours.

Then on March 19 we pulled ahead. Scaling up S. Korea’s number in proportion to our larger population, they had 45 deaths and we had 68. Their mortality rate (scaled) peaked at 58 five days later, but by then we had reached 268 deaths per day. 

A month later, around April 15, we were averaging more than 2,000 per day, while S. Korea (still scaled up to match our population) was averaging 26 per day. And on that day President Moon’s Liberal Party won control of the legislature, taking 60% of the seats. His COVID-19 success played no small role in this.

You can see his success on the chart above. The blue Korean line is slightly above our red line for a month until suddenly we take off exponentially and tens of thousands of Americans die.

What happened? What was S. Korea doing during those first two months before March 19 when we let COVID go exponential while they held it in check?

The answer is they were doing almost everything. Meanwhile, we were twiddling our thumbs in denial. That’s the difference between leadership and political posturing.

To be a little more specific, they were testing like crazy, doing high-tech contact tracing and then quarantining individuals who were exposed. This meant they were able to stop the epidemic without shutting down their economy. They saved thousands of lives and probably a million jobs.

The video below explains what they did in some detail. Compared to the U.S. response, it is mind-blowing. It’s a brilliant video but it makes one important mistake at the end when it says, “Korea’s strategy in testing might not be easy to replicate in countries with much larger populations.”

Certainly, their strategy is not easy to replicate; it takes great organization and hard work. But larger countries like the US have proportionally larger resources. There’s no reason we could not have done as well. And we should and could still follow a similar course, although we will have to continue social distancing as we phase-in contact tracing. But the two efforts will complement each other.