How did South Korea get ahead?

South Korea is experiencing one of the largest coronavirus outbreaks outside China, where the pneumonia-causing pathogen SARS-CoV-2 first took root late last year.

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But unlike China, which locked down a province of more than 60 million people to try to stop the illness from spreading, Korea hasn’t put any curbs on internal movement in place, instead testing hundreds of thousands of people everywhere from clinics to drive-thru stations.

The testing blitz appears to be paying off in a lower-than-average mortality rate. The outbreak also shows signs of being largely contained in Daegu, the city about 150 miles south of Seoul where most of the country’s more than 7,700 infections have emerged.

It’s an approach born of bitter experience. An outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2015 killed 38 people in South Korea. Because of a lack of kits to test for the MERS pathogen, infected patients went from hospital to hospital seeking help, spreading the virus widely. Afterward, the country created a system to allow rapid approval of testing kits for viruses that have the potential to cause pandemics.