Later that evening, you get a text message letting you know whether you're COVID positive. The daily new case count in the entire country has mostly stayed in the single digits for a few days straight now.
Imagine that you're in a midsize city, the lock-down has been lifted and you finally go back to the office and see your colleagues for the first time in months.
Tune into ABC at 1 p.m. ET and ABC News Live at 4 p.m. ET every weekday for special coverage of the novel coronavirus with the full ABC News team, including the latest news, context and analysis. This is not some fantasy of what America's response to the novel coronavirus pandemic could have been. It’s reality -- on the ground, right now -- but in South Korea. And it's a model that experts say the U.S. could look to replicate as best it can, despite some fundamental differences between the two democracies, as it continues the long fight against the virus and prepares for a potential second wave.
But South Korea quickly activated a response system put in place during the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, known as MERS, outbreak five years ago and expanded its testing capacity and contact tracing. MERS had a fatality rate of about 20% in South Korea, so many South Koreans knew instinctively how devastating a viral epidemic could be.
Experts with whom ABC News spoke said South Korea's greater success in fighting the outbreak came in part due to its ability to institute widespread coronavirus testing and contact tracing far earlier in the pandemic, cheap and effective care for those who got infected, and, perhaps most importantly, a greater cultural trust in the government whose transparent and consistent messaging prompted citizens to take more protective measures ahead of the virus and generally support more aggressive...
To see how South Korea differentiated itself from the United States in its pandemic response, it's necessary to look back to the very beginning, to the time when South Korean leaders were warning of a possible crisis with just the first few positive cases, while some top American officials were alternating between ignoring it and calling it a hoax.
Even as the curve appears to be flattening and the country reopens, South Koreans continue to protect themselves by wearing masks whenever out in public. Recently Vice President Mike Pence was photographed during a hospital visit not wearing a mask, contrary to what the hospital said was its policy. Thursday, Pence did wear a mask when visiting a ventilator factory.Easy access to testing and health careFrom local public health centers to drive-through testing sites around every corner, the easy access to testing has been one of the most important tactical success stories of South Korea's pandemic response, public health experts say.
The coronavirus has been circulating around both countries for a few months, but only in the last two weeks did the U.S. surpass the Asian nation in per capita testing rate, according to an analysis of official figures compiled by Our World in Data. As of Thursday, with at least 6 million tests administered in the U.S., one in every 53 people in the country has been tested so far. In South Korea, with a total of 619,881 tests, one in every 83 people has been tested so far.
In South Korea, universal healthcare also allows people to walk into any designated testing site or care facility without the fear of cost. But in the U.S., even as many states and cities plan to roll out free testing, the cost of care should the person test positive and the hurdles of going through their healthcare providers covered by their insurance have continued to slow down widespread testing efforts.
It's the result of an aggressive contact tracing operation, which integrates GPS data, credit card data and surveillance footage as well as other information from 28 different data sources to perform real-time analysis to quickly and precisely identify those who might have come into close contact with a COVID-19 patient, according to health experts.
In the U.S., states have begun pushing forward aggressive contact tracing operations only in recent weeks. California announced last week that it is building a massive army of 10,000 volunteer contact tracers as part of its efforts to prepare for future reentry, and Massachusetts recently hired more than 300 people to begin tracing in the first week of the program and an additional 2,200 volunteer traces to help with the effort.
“There are ways to assess the health risk posed by specific businesses in specific areas,” Baicker stated. “We could begin to reopen more of the economy safely if we focused on those businesses that provided the greatest benefit at the lowest risk.” Meanwhile, the U.S. issued a Presidential Proclamation prohibiting foreign nationals who have visited countries across Europe, China, and Iran in the past 14 days from entering the U.S. The proclamation doesn’t mention U.S. citizens, and for those who do arrive from other countries, there is no uniform testing system other than the CDC guidance to stay home and monitor temperature for 14 days upon arrival.
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