The secret behind South Korea’s Covid success

At the start of the pandemic, the situation in care homes looked particularly grim. One report on 19 March said: ‘Experts warn that hundreds of substandard long-term care facilities could serve as hotbeds for the contagious coronavirus.’ The alert came not from Wiltshire or Manchester, but from Park Chan-kyong, Seoul correspondent of the South China Morning Post. There was real fear that the residents of the city’s care homes would become victims of the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet three months on, South Korea as a whole — let alone its care homes — has suffered fewer than 300 deaths nationwide. The world is asking: how?

Things have looked slightly worse recently — 49 new cases discovered last week — but this is nothing in comparison with Europe. Rather than imposing total lockdown, South Korea closed some schools and the rest of the country carried on. We’ve seen plenty of coverage on all this, along with its test and trace policy using mobile phone apps to identify and eliminate disease hotspots. This has inspired the UK government (and others) to develop its own test-and-trace app, but there has been less attention paid to the way that wider cultural factors have enabled South Korea to become, along with Taiwan and New Zealand, the poster child for effective virus control.

Let’s start with South Korea’s level of comfort with technology, backed up by some of the best 5G broadband in the world. At the last count, its internet penetration rate was 96 per cent, compared with around 81 per cent in the UK. South Korea did not reach this position by accident; rather it is the result of its decision over decades to mix state support and private-sector provision to create managed competition between the three telecoms companies that now provide 5G.