Posted on 03/20/2020 1:29:31 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
SEOUL -- Since its first outbreak of the novel coronavirus in late January, South Korea has been waging a hard battle to contain the virus infections by preaching a "social distancing" drive and tracing all potential cases. Months later, its virus cases are showing signs of a slowdown.
What is drawing much attention from peer nations is, among others, its virus testing capability. Since Jan. 3, the country has conducted some 316,000 tests and identified more than 8,600 COVID-19 cases, according to data from Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC). The country reported its first COVID-19 case on Jan. 20.
Its mass-scale and rapid virus testing capabilities overwhelmingly outshine other nations. The United States, for instance, is known to have tested more than 60,000 people even though the country also reported its first virus case like South Korea on Jan. 20.
Now the World Health Organization (WHO) is telling other countries to learn from South Korea.
"A month ago, the Republic of Korea was faced with accelerating community transmission, but it didn't surrender," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at the media briefing Wednesday. "It developed an innovative testing strategy and expanded lab capacity."
The country's impressive testing capability for the novel coronavirus came from the readiness of the diagnostic industry that learned from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) crisis in 2015.
The country reported 186 MERS cases at that time, more than any country besides Saudi Arabia, and had 38 deaths, recording a fatality rate of 20 percent.
South Korea's mortality rate for the novel coronavirus is around only 1 percent, far below the death rate reported in countries like China and Italy.
Experts said the MERS crisis prompted health authorities to set up a center fully dedicated to handling laboratory control of infectious diseases so that the country could better analyze infectious pathogens, develop laboratory testing methods and diagnostic reagents.
"With the establishment of the center, the KCDC was able to work closely with infectious disease experts and accelerate its efforts to adjust national standards for examination and laboratory accreditation systems of infectious diseases," said Seong Won-keun, former head of the KCDC's laboratory control center. "As we can see from the country's COVID-19 testing ability, it turned out to be a smart move."
Learning from the MERS outbreak, South Korea also moved swiftly to tackle the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Kwon Gye-cheol, chairman of the Korean Society for Laboratory Medicine (KSLM), said that South Korean health authorities and testing kit developers were ready to fight against the novel coronavirus even before the country reported its first case.
"The KCDC and our KSLM members began researching diagnosis methods for the novel coronavirus as soon as they acquired genome sequence data released from China on Jan. 13," Kwon said. "Test kit makers and testing institutions also joined the efforts quickly because they knew what happened in the country in 2015."
On Jan. 27, some 20 representatives from the KCDC, the KSLM and test kit developers gathered for a meeting in Seoul, and there, health authorities told diagnostic kit developers to apply for "emergency-use authorization," which allows the use of unapproved medical products in an emergency situation to diagnose or treat life-threatening diseases when there are no available alternatives.
South Korea's test kit supply took off Feb. 4 after local test kit maker Kogene Biotech Co.'s product first earned emergency-use approval from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety.
Since then, four more kit makers have earned emergency-use approval, and South Korea can now produce a maximum of 130,000 test kits a day, according to health ministry officials.
While test kit developers concentrated on their jobs, South Korea's health authorities focused on selecting effective test methods and securing reliable testing institutions.
"In less than a month, the country was able to establish a complete testing system because everyone was ready and knew what to do," Kwon said. "Even though it was set up quickly, the country's testing system is reliable. South Korea's virus test accuracy is currently about 98 percent."
South Korea can now conduct some 25,000 tests a day, with nearly 600 sample collecting centers and 95 testing institutions operating in the country, according to health authorities.
The use of the real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing method that gives test results in six hours, and the introduction of drive-thru testing centers, where people stay in their cars to get tested, also helped South Korea conduct more virus tests.
South Korea's diagnostic capability also comes from the power of laboratory medicine doctors. The country has more than 1,100 laboratory medicine doctors who are specialists in managing virus tests.
"Some people from other countries are surprised when they found out infectious disease doctors here don't diagnose infectious pathogens," said Lee Hyuk-min, a doctor at Yonsei University Health System's Severance Hospital in Seoul. "Of course, they make final clinical judgments, but in South Korea, that's the job of laboratory medicine doctors."
Lee, also a director at the KSLM, said private-run laboratories' ability to swiftly shift their testing workforce also helped South Korea boost its diagnostic capability.
"South Korea also has a good communication system with public health authorities to share virus data and training systems," he said.
Contact tracing and quarantine of contacts is also essential to S Korea’s approach.
They also reccomended chloroquine and remdesivir, the two drugs FDA has just given expanded access and approved new clinical trials for.
Media skewer and distort.
Here in Washington state we have tested 21,000 since patient zero on January 20.
“316,000 tests and identified more than 8,600 COVID-19 cases.”
8,600 / 316,000 = 2.72% of those tested are positive. We can assume that typically only people who have known exposures or symptoms have been tested. This thing does not appear to be as contagious as we have been led to believe.
Exponential growth, early days yet.
Media also tell us, ‘Don’t bother with masks. Masks are useless.” Then I see footage of folks Japan and South Korea... and they’re all wearing masks. Go figure.
No! Did you even bother to read the article??? These statistics are from South Korea where the virus has already peaked and is now on the decline as it is in China. It is revealing that there are so many here who appear to want to believe the hysteria even in the face of hard data. This virus was never likely to be as deadly here this year as most flu seasons.
“Media also tell us, ‘Don’t bother with masks. Masks are useless.”
Except a doctor wrote an article in the New York Times 2 days ago about masks and said that research showed that any mask protected better than no mask. This doctor said that even a scarf tied around the face provided more protection than none. We don’t have masks available in this country because of our inept CDC. They spent CDC money on other things than preparing this country to be ready in the case of a large epidemic or pandemic. We talked to a friend in France today that said the same thing has occurred there, no masks for health care workers and he said that it has become a big scandal in France right now.
CDC needs to study GloBull warming, drug use, evil opiate EPIDEMIC. Yes. Lol. The government via CDC was calling and hyping opiate use as an EPIDEMIC . They weren’t preparing for real EPIDEMICs or real PANDEMICs. They were out creating fake ones that don’t require real work or real preparation. Just write papers.
Welcome to the real world. This is what our federal government spent their funds on. This is the EPIDEMIC they are prepared for. https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/index.html
It’s not just “contact tracing” as we might think of it. S. Korea’s ability to monitor its citizens via cameras, cell phones, and so on, makes that old show “The Prisoner” seem like child’s play. Think: “Orwell on steroids”.
Just wondering of anyone knows.
In one of the press conferences, the tests they were running (on a nasal swab I think) can be run in a few minutes with the results. It can be done by “local” labs. In Seattle they had two labs that could run them, but I think they have more now. The biggest factor is the time from taking the sample and getting it to the lab.
I’m guessing they wait until they have a bunch of samples to run, so maybe a suburban hospital makes a run at noon and another at 6 pm to send off the batches?
That's called a LIE. When one talking head said that a poorly fitted mask was worse than no mask at all I knew the BS was running thick. And then made it sound like fitting was more than picking small/medium/large, making sure it was fitted tightly and not having a beard preventing a seal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoxpvDVo_NI
Not exactly rocket science.
If SKorea’s testing is so effective, let them test the effectiveness of chloroquine on their many patients on a voluntary basis. Make the patient an offer they can’t refuse — either a sum of money or hope of survival.
Your point is even stronger considering a lot of those are false positives. I notice nobody gives the false positive rate, which is probably 1% or more.
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