◼ COVID-19 / GOVERNMENT21LEE JAE-WON/ZUMA PRESS (2)It’s an approach born of bitter experience. An out-
break of Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2015
killed 38 people in South Korea. Because of a lack of
kits to test for the MERS pathogen, infected patients
went from hospital to hospital seeking help, spread-
ing the virus widely. Afterward, the country created
a system to allow rapid approval of testing kits for
viruses that have the potential to cause pandemics.
When the novel coronavirus emerged, that system
allowed regulators to collaborate quickly with local
biotech companies and researchers to develop test-
ing kits based on a genetic sequence of the virus
released by China in mid-January. Companies were
then granted accreditation to make and sell the kits
within weeks—a process that usually takes a year.
South Korea has managed to test more than 210,000
people for the coronavirus, using kits with sensitiv-
ity rates of more than 95%, according to the direc-
tor of the Korean Society for Laboratory Medicine.
That’s in stark contrast to China, where unreliable
and inadequate testing resulted in thousands of
infected patients not being quarantined until it was
too late. A similar scenario may be playing out in
Japan and the U.S.
Testing widely has meant South Korea knows
where its infections are centered, and so far it’s been
able to keep them largely contained, with outbreaks
beyond Daegu in the minority. The country reported
many consecutive days of slowing infections untilHow did
South Korea
get ahead?
South Korea is experiencing one of the largest
coronavirus outbreaks outside China, where the
pneumonia-causing pathogen SARS-CoV-2 first took
root late last year. But unlike China, which locked
down a province of more than 60 million people to
try to stop the illness from spreading, Korea hasn’t
put any curbs on internal movement in place, instead
testing hundreds of thousands of people everywhere
from clinics to drive-thru stations.
The testing blitz appears to be paying off in a
lower-than-average mortality rate. The outbreak also
shows signs of being largely contained in Daegu, the
city about 150 miles south of Seoul where most of the
country’s more than 7,700 infections have emerged.▲ Medical staff
get samples at a
drive-thru clinic
testing people for
the coronavirus in
Goyang, north of
Seoul, on Feb. 28
◀ People arrive in
their cars at the
Goyang center, where
testing takes about 10
minutesto complete as many samples and sequences as
possible. She puts her toddler to bed and then
logs back on to her computer.
On a call with reporters on March 9, Nancy
Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center
for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, called
Bedford’s theory that the original U.S. coronavirus
patient in January was the source of the outbreak in
the state “interesting,” but said other possibilities
won’t be been ruled out. “There are alternate expla-
nations of the same findings,” she said. There may
have been a “secondary seeding,” as more recent
cases in Washington match viral sequences posted
in China. So far, Bedford has reported, sequencing
still suggests the transmission is related to the orig-
inal patient. What’s more, the state’s early cases
may have seeded infections spreading on the cruise
ship Grand Princess (now docked in Oakland), he
tweeted on March 6. On March 10, he tweeted that
the accumulating data “points to a growing outbreak
of #COVID19 in the greater Seattle area” and that if
people don’t heed the social-distancing warnings
of health authorities, “I fully expect cases to keep
climbing.” �Peter Robison, Dina Bass, and Robert
Langreth, with Emma Court and Michelle Fay Cortez“We are
testing people
on the biggest
scale, at the
fastest pace in
the world”