As of this week, South Korea had just over 9,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, which puts it among the top 10 countries for total cases.
But South Korea has another distinction: Health experts are noting that recently the nation has managed to significantly slow the number of new cases. And the country appears to have reined in the outbreak without some of the strict lockdown strategies deployed elsewhere in the world.
“We’ve seen examples in places like Singapore and [South] Korea, where governments haven’t had to shut everything down,” said Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme. “They’ve been able to make tactical decisions regarding schools, tactical decisions regarding movements, and been able to move forward without some of the draconian measures.”
Speaking this week to journalists, Ryan said that countries that have tested widely for the virus, isolated cases and quarantined suspected cases — in the way that South Korea and Singapore have done — have managed to suppress transmission of the virus. President Trump has also praised South Korea’s handling of the health crisis and even asked President Moon Jae-in for help with medical equipment to fight the outbreak in the United States.
The head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has called on other countries around the world to “apply the lessons learned in [South] Korea and elsewhere” in their own battles against the coronavirus.
Read the full story from NPR.com here: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/26/821688981/how-south-korea-reigned-in-the-outbreak-without-shutting-everything-down
