So what did South Korea do right?

South Korean drive-in coronavirus testing facility

The one bright spot in this saga of the novel coronavirus is the performance of South Korea’s health care system, as they managed not only to ‘flatten the curve’ but actually smash it. Whereas China was learning by trial-and-error which solutions to the outbreak in Wuhan would prove most effective, South Korea was watching and taking careful notes. Once the disease hit their borders they implemented the plans they had with an astounding vigour and efficiency. So what did they actually do right?

1. Aggressive rapid testing. South Korea used its month’s reprieve from new cases of the coronavirus to develop a reliable test for COVID-19 which is easy to administer and quick to return results. Then both public and private laboratories working together unrolled 10,000 individual tests in February, the vast majority of which of course came back negative. Because they had implemented this aggressive régime of testing, once the case load started ramping up, they actually had the means to process 12,000 coronavirus tests per day throughout the country. Many of these are done in drive-in testing centres where patients are tested for coronavirus through the windows of their cars and given their results within the hour. Oh, yeah: and it’s free at the point of use.
   
   Here, though, our government essentially squandered the brief window of reprieve bought for us by China’s much more Leviathan-esque testing and containment policies. Instead of authorising public state labs to start doing tests to prepare for the inevitable ramp-up, the administration sat on its hams. Very possibly, the administration was pressured to do so by the big pharma companies which stand to profit by developing proprietary coronavirus tests, treatments and vaccines which they can sell. A government fettered to unfettered capital simply did not deliver the kind of timely and efficient results that South Korea’s mixed œconomy did.


2. Innovative use of GPS and GIS. The South Korean government implemented a tracking and public access database system that allowed the public to view each individual confirmed case of COVID-19, as well as keep tabs on the position and movement of these cases. In the United States, we would likely consider this an intolerable breach of civil liberty, and an intrusion into individual privacy. However, there is little question that in South Korea’s case, this aggressive use of surveillance technology and public access to information about the spread of the disease and infected areas absolutely did save lives and prevent the rampant proliferation of new cases.


3. Social solidarity; deference to authority and the elderly. It may sound a bit oxymoronic, but concerted efforts at social distancing are in fact, in the case of a pandemic, a form of social solidarity. I could do so, but I’m not going to attempt to tie the South Korean public’s coronavirus response directly to Confucius or Mencius. Attributing broad social trends like this to a vague cultural-stratum ‘Confucianism’ is and should be rather suspect. This sort of analysis indeed can be lazily or frivolously used to tell just-so stories about any difference in outcomes between an East Asian and a Western nation, whether positive or negative. And it’s also important to emphasise that this respect for authority is not the same thing as what most Westerners mean by ‘authoritarianism’.
   
   But it absolutely is the case that the Korean public has a number of cultural advantages in this case. It’s a foregone conclusion that South Korea wouldn’t have the kind of outcomes it does, if ordinary South Koreans hadn’t listened to the relevant public authorities, considered health to be a public matter instead of a merely individual one, and limited their own personal freedoms of movement and association out of respect for, and solidarity with, the elderly and immune-compromised.
   
   American insistence on resisting any and all forms of constraint or limits – even if those limits are soft and imposed by custom, social stricture or religious dictum instead of by the state – has already come to the fore in a particularly ugly and crass way as we’re facing down this crisis. You see young people going out to St Patrick’s Day parties in defiance of the state government and the CDC’s recommendations. You even see people publicly defying the advice of the CDC because ‘this is America’ and ‘I’ll do what I want’. This is what happens when you have more respect for comedians and talk-show hosts than for scientists and schoolteachers. It’s also what happens when you consider health as a merely individual matter: the attitude that ‘I’m young’, ‘I’m healthy’, ‘I’m being careful’ and ‘I’m not about to put my life on hold’ is dangerous and irresponsible. The people who have this attitude show a cavalier disrespect for the elderly that in this case could be lethal.

Again, this is not a call to panic. In panics human beings tend to revert to their baser selves, not their higher ones, and that is precisely what we do not want at this point. To be frank, the time for a concerted, humane (in the Confucian sense of ren 仁, or in this case in 인) action on the coronavirus was a month and more ago. But what should be done still can be done in advance of the logarithmic inflection point. Follow the recommendations of the CDC. Keep your hands clean, cover your cough, don’t share your fork. Moreover, call your parents – and grandparents and other elderly relatives if you have them – and make sure they’re okay.

South Korea has demonstrated that a liberal political system is not necessarily an impediment to an effective response to a pandemic. But if you’re going to have such a political system, you need to have, and what’s more you need to actively and ferociously preserve, the underlying forms of humility; solidarity; family feeling; deference to authority; self-limitation including in movement, speech and privacy; and acknowledgement of collective limits that elsewhere in the industrialised world we seem to have left by the wayside. A liberal political system is untenable without a certain set of illiberal presumptions about the way the political world functions.