How South Korea Flattened the Coronavirus Curve Max Fisher and Choe Sang-Hun 13 hrs ago
a group of people standing in front of a crowd: To spare hospitals and clinics from being overwhelmed, officials opened 600 testing centers designed to screen as many people as possible.
1/6 SLIDES © Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
To spare hospitals and clinics from being overwhelmed, officials opened 600 testing centers designed to screen as many people as possible. No matter how you look at the numbers, one country stands out from the rest: South Korea.
In late February and early March, the number of new coronavirus infections in the country exploded from a few dozen, to a few hundred, to several thousand.
At the peak, medical workers identified 909 new cases in a single day, Feb. 29, and the country of 50 million people appeared on the verge of being overwhelmed. But less than a week later, the number of new cases halved. Within four days, it halved again — and again the next day.
On Sunday, South Korea reported only 64 new cases, the fewest in nearly a month, even as infections in other countries continue to soar by the thousands daily, devastating health care systems and economies. Italy records several hundred deaths daily; South Korea has not had more than eight in a day.
South Korea is one of only two countries with large outbreaks, alongside China, to flatten the curve of new infections. And it has done so without China’s draconian restrictions on speech and movement, or economically damaging lockdowns like those in Europe and the United States.
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