The Country That Learned To Live With Covid-19

As other nations locked down or let the coronavirus run rampant, South Korea found a middle way—and a road map for future pandemics

- Matthew Campbell and Heesu Lee

Park Young Joon was worried that South Korea could lose control. As director for epidemiological investigations at the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, he’d been dispatched to Daegu, a city of 2.5 million in the south, to deal with an urgent situation. A rash of novel coronavirus cases had just emerged among members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, an obscure and secretive religious group whose services involve close physical contact. The first congregant tested positive on Feb. 17, becoming South Korea’s 31st Covid-19 patient. Soon the number of new daily cases was in double digits, then triple—evidence that an exponential outbreak was in progress. “I remember seeing the triple-digit cases,” Park says, speaking through a translator, “and thinking to myself that this must be what people mean when they use the word ‘surge.’ ”

In the early days of the outbreak, public-health officials treated each case more or less individually, with contact tracers compiling detailed histories of a patient’s recent whereabouts and screening others accordingly. But many of the churchgoers and family members who were testing positive had no obvious link with earlier cases. The virus was spreading along paths Park and his team at the KDCA couldn’t see.

The only way to stop it, he thought, was something drastic: quarantining everyone who’d set foot in the nine-story building that housed Shincheonji’s Daegu operations. The measure would be mandatory, covering about 9,000 people, regardless of where they’d been in the building or whether they’d interacted with a known carrier. Anyone who subsequently tested positive would have their contacts screened; then those people would have their own contacts screened, and so on until the chain stopped.