"Safety Plan" ... How did South Korea succeed in controlling "Covid-19"?

On the evening of April 19th, the whole world turned to South Korea when only 1 (1) reported eight new infections from the Corona virus (Covid-19). In circumstances like what we are going through, what happened there is the closest thing to a miracle in a country that was once the largest number of injuries outside China, which nominated it to move to the fate of Italy or Spain, but South Korea had only one thing that not everyone had, which is They learned a harsh lesson earlier.

Harsh lessons

In fact, the story of the South Koreans with the new Corona Virus (Covid-19) begins (2) on May 4, 2015, when a 68-year-old Korean businessman returned to Seoul from a massive business trip during which he moved between a number of The Gulf states, within a few days of his arrival, had moved between a group of hospitals due to a high fever that did not appear to respond to any of the well-known medications, which ended up in the Samsung Medical Center, and there was a diagnosis of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (3) "Mears" ( MERS) caused by a serious coronavirus.

By May 20, the man had transmitted the infection to 28 people in the hospitals he visited, meanwhile the Korean authorities suddenly lost control, there were no plans ready for such an order, the epidemic lasted for two months in Korean territory, infected 186 people and killed 38 This made it the largest country in the world to become ill after the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (its starting center), and it was one of the largest panic attacks that the country has met.

Daily Cases in South Korea (Al Jazeera)

The wave of the epidemic is over. Mears ’ability to spread was weaker than his predecessor,“ Sars, ”although his lethal abilities were greater by a clear difference. At that point, the Koreans had realized that the error was mainly in the way they managed the situation. Sixteen days allowed The virus has an outbreak during which the health system concealed a lot of data for fear of affecting the economy and psychological damage to those affected, as well as the state had been late in considering the Arab Gulf as a danger zone in the first place, and hospital protocols - by extension - dealt with arrivals from countries with symptoms of cold with complete satisfaction.

After that incident, the Korean authorities took decisive (4) measures that depend on prevention before treatment. For example, it realized that it was well aware of the importance of tracking patients, so it issued decisions that enable healthcare professionals to access patients ’data from their calls to their credit cards, and the Korean government also issued A decision to work on developing laboratory capabilities in its laboratories, on the other hand, allowed companies that develop virus tests to start using them in epidemiological situations exceptionally and without fully checking their suitability.

Kings of Examination

Well, it's the 25th of January 2020, the numbers in China are steadily rising warning of a near disaster, the countries of the world see it as a disaster for China, but the Korean authorities had learned the experience, a few companies started early (5) in developing tests The virus is accurate, and with the first cases arriving in South Korea, the first tests were already almost there, but it suddenly evolved with the arrival of Case 31 that the whole world talked about.

She is one of the women of the semi-Christian sect that had contracted the disease (6) in January, and in February she went to a hospital in Daegu, the country's fourth largest city, after a rise in temperatures, but she ignored the doctors' appeals. By conducting the examination, I went twice to the crowded church, to a crowded hotel, and to more than one hospital. We now know that this lady started a series of injuries that ended with 5016 injuries, she was called the “Shinchunji Church Cluster”.

Here the state of emergency began, panic spread throughout the country, while - during the first week of March - daily numbers were recorded that no one could have imagined occurring outside China, meanwhile companies had already come up with accurate checks in an exceptionally short period ( Work begins January 25 then tests arrive February 18), at some point production rates were 100,000 per day, and here the country started a very intense, randomized (7) examination campaign, which started with six hundred testing centers only separate from hospitals, With hundreds of centers on the roads that pull samples directly from patients in their cars. (While all of the country's injuries were around 10,000, the number of daily checks was 20,000.)

Meanwhile, the Korean authorities had learned another lesson from MIRS’s atmosphere. Almost half of the injuries were coming from the hospitals themselves, and in the case of SARS in China, one of the biggest problems was the specifics of health-care professionals specifically that cause panic in hospitals and reduce The country's capabilities to resist, here the government decided to conduct a larger number of examinations for the doctors and nurses and hospital staff, so the patient rooms were of negative pressure in order not to expel the injury to the outside, and the medical team committed to very careful procedures in clothing and movement, while the examination rooms were completely closed, The examiner stands outside and stretches his hands with plastic gloves located inside the room, so that he is completely isolated from the examiner.

When did you go to the kitchen?

But all of the above would not have succeeded except with an important step that complements the plan. Your high levels of examination will not be sufficient in a country with more than 50 million citizens. It is like being blind looking for a number of silver coins lying on a vast area of ​​an entire acre, of course You can check all the land with your hands little by little to reach all the currencies, but if there is a tactic that indicates the best possibilities, the survey period will be very short.

Here the second most exciting aspect of the plan appears, it is "tracking". South Korea is a country where the number of smartphones exceeds the population, as well as to determine your location, there are three (8) additional methods besides the GPS capabilities that make it "Catching" the patient's exact itinerary is possible.

The first is the Transceiver transmitters and receivers located throughout the country, which makes it possible to determine your movement within a few meters, and the second is surveillance cameras, there are 8 million cameras in the streets of South Korea, which makes there is one camera for every six people, if you were A Korean citizen takes you more than a hundred photos a day on average, but if you are traveling then this number doubles, and the third is tracking people's dealings via credit cards, which enables, in accordance with other methods of monitoring, to confirm a person's itinerary.

Koreans' phones give instant warnings of danger places in the country (Communication sites)

When the medical team knows that someone has been infected, the first step is to direct exams in intensity toward the cluster that they have created, all those in contact with it must be examined. If you are an infected Korean citizen, all your data (9) during the past two weeks will become public to all people, all the places that you entered, including places that you do not want anyone to know about, as well as they will know all means of transportation that you used, not only that, but they will know The position of your seat on the bus, cinema, or government interest, and everyone who crosses his itinerary with you, even for a few seconds, is required to go for a test. (China implemented something similar when it identified citizens with color codes ranging from green (low risk) to red (high risk).

Meanwhile, the priority of receiving testing centers for people was based on those maps, which accelerated the process of detection of the disease, we know that the distance between an injury and the next is only one week during which one person can affect 2-3 people in his vicinity, add to Because we also know that it is transmitted without apparent symptoms, in fact a recent study had been published in the journal (10) "Nature" indicates that the peak of the ability to infection is in the three days that stop the moment when symptoms appear in the middle. This means one essential thing, which is that you have to catch every casualty, literally every casualty.

With the increase in the number of patients, day after day, it became clear that the hospitals would be filled soon, and here it was decided to separate the owners of minor symptoms from those with heavy symptoms that required deeper medical intervention, and therefore a percentage of citizens was imposed a compulsory quarantine that includes an instantaneous tracking of the places of their movement, so that it can be You know if they are in the living room or in the bathroom or the kitchen, with permanent follow-up calls, and large financial penalties for breaking the stone.

At that point, the Korean administration resorted to artificial intelligence (11) to analyze a very large amount of data aimed at building a complete accurate picture of the nature of the outbreak of infection in the country. For example, if the trajectory of two people with the disease is traced and it is found that they never crossed together, this means that each of them received their infection from another person, which means by extension that the infection is spread in the country in a way that the authorities are still unaware of, which means a need for a greater degree of Tracking, in the end, all of that data creates a complete final tree, with each state returning to one of its branches.

Other successful experiences

South Korea followed a clear policy that completely stands on the facts and does not take into account the embarrassment towards the stigma of the disease. Case 31 was a direct example of what would happen if negligence, new cases were announced minute by minute, and when a case was announced, smart phone maps directly warn citizens against going to places Through certain streets or through certain streets, the news was feeling the state of "approaching war", that developed a degree of popular responsibility towards the epidemic, and on the other hand the results were the opposite of what you might think, nobody was afraid, and South Korea was one of the few countries that did not rush Its inhabitants of the markets are in exceptional contention, and people even feel that the state is strong and accurate in following them.

To date, the South Korean experience is the most successful in the whole world, in addition to that other similar experiences have received the same degrees of success, and according to a study (12) recently published in the famous medical journal "The Lancet", this successful duo, the intensive examination supported by tracking It was a major cause of the daily decline in the number of cases after the height of the epidemiological wave at the end of March in Hong Kong. Besides, a survey conducted by the study indicated that the majority of the population adheres to the preventive measures.

On the other hand, a study that was issued (13) a few days ago in the journal "Medicine Medicine" says that even with measures of social isolation, stopping the spread of the virus depends on two basic criteria, which are tracking the tree of people with the disease carefully along with performing the largest possible number of Tests, everyone now knows that these technologies are essential to getting rid of the disease or even reducing it, South Korea now receives requests from 121 countries to copy its experience and supply the largest number of tests. 

Germany (14) and several other European countries are looking to implement similar plans to track patients while modifying these models in a way that makes them more susceptible to Western sensitivities, and Google and Apple have recently agreed to create a new joint application that educates people in affected areas , And infected people, what lessened the mixing with patients, but all that - according to those intentions - will be voluntary, meaning that you - as a citizen - will be a choice between accepting to share your data or not.

Safety plan

In fact, there are historical roots to this Korean success, the South Korean health system is well funded, and has basic infrastructure that the country started after World War II (15), and while Western societies were preoccupied with their accelerated attempts to work on people's well-being, the Korean economy was concerned with the development and transformation of industry, Meanwhile, health care has been a major goal not only for the purposes of economic development, but for the consideration of citizens in a system that is not democratic but has faced several uprisings during the past few decades, which has made it work to take care of obtaining the acceptance of its citizens, the Korean people deal with this degree of consideration as Corresponding to Western democracy.

In a clearer sense, the Korean citizen accepted this bargain with a wide openness, and considered that in exceptional times personal freedoms can be sacrificed to serve everyone, as it is a very dangerous game, as Yuval Noah Harari (16) says specifically about Europe and America, but for Koreans it was understood some The thing is, especially since the matter will in any case result in a restriction of freedoms, tracking measures allowed the citizens there to leave the house and life continued almost naturally even at the height of the virus wave, China - on the other side - focused more on the compulsory social isolation of citizens, another form of restriction Freedoms. 

In any case, the procedures for careful tracking and intensive examination have proven effective, and everyone agrees that it can mitigate the escalation of cases in many countries, even if it is not an opportunity to completely end the epidemic in the countries where the disease has spread and cross the barrier of no return. 

Of course, South Korea is always ready to receive any new shock due to the opening of a focus. It is similar to climbing a mountain that does not know where its summit, but compared to countries where casualties started at the same time with South Korea, we talk here more specifically about the United States American and Italy, at least life is going on in the country naturally until now, and the loss of life is much less by a vast difference from her female friends (240 cases), and this in itself is a fundamental victory.