SouthKorea reported its lowest number of cases since last month on Sunday — a remarkable turnaround from the several thousand cases that exploded there in late February and early March.
Its strategy was not the full lockdown that China employed, or even the widespread restrictions that the U.S. and Europe have implemented. Instead, it focused on swift, widespread testing and contact tracing, our Interpreter columnist writes.
In the week after its first reported case, SouthKorea moved rapidly, eventually opening 600 testing centers and keeping health workers safe by minimizing contact. Once someone tested positive, officials meticulously traced their movements using security camera footage, credit card records, even GPS data from their cars and cellphones.
Reminder:SouthKorean officials caution that their successes are tentative. A risk of resurgence remains, particularly as epidemics continue raging beyond the country’s borders.
***
...Yet new clusters are emerging, and for 20% of confirmed cases, it’s unclear how they became infected, suggesting there is still undetected community spread. “As long as this uncertainty remains, we cannot say that the outbreak has peaked,” Chun says. More data needed
The government hopes to control new clusters in the same way it confronted the one in Shincheonji. The national testing capacity has reached a staggering 15,000 tests per day. There are 43 drive-through testing stations nationwide, a concept now copied in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In the first week of March, the Ministry of the Interior also rolled out a smartphone app that can track the quarantined and collect data on symptoms.
Chun says scientists are eager to see more epidemiological data. “We are literally stamping our feet,” Chun says. KCDC releases the basic counts of patients, their age and gender, and how many are linked to clusters. “That is not enough,” Chun says. He and others would like to study detailed individual patient data, which would enable epidemiologists to model the outbreak and determine the number of new infections triggered by each case, also known as the basic reproductive number or R0; the time from infection to the onset of symptoms; and whether early diagnosis improved patients’ outcomes. (South Korea has had 75 deaths so far, an unusually low mortality rate, although the fact that Shincheonji church members are mostly young may have contributed.) Chun says a group of epidemiologists and scientists has proposed partnering with KCDC to gather and share such information, “and we are waiting for their response.”
Kim says medical doctors are also planning to share details of the clinical features of COVID-19 cases in the country in forthcoming publications. “We hope our experience will help other countries control this COVID-19 outbreak.”
沒有留言:
張貼留言