Opinion: What explains South Korea’s success at limiting Covid-19?

Writing for the Conversation, Dr Jung Won Sonn (Bartlett School of Planning, UCL) points to the importance of surveillance, with infected individuals tracked and their movements flagged online for all to see. South Korea has been  widely praised  for its management of the outbreak and spread of the coronavirus disease COVID-19. The focus has largely been on South Korea's  enormous virus testing programme. What hasn't been so widely reported is the country's heavy use of surveillance technology, notably CCTV and the tracking of bank card and mobile phone usage, to identify who to test in the first place. And this is an important lesson for more liberal countries that might be less tolerant of such privacy invading measures but are hoping to emulate South Korea's success. While Taiwan and Singapore have  excelled in containing the coronavirus , South Korea and China arguably provide the best models for stopping outbreaks when large numbers of people have been infected. China quarantined confirmed and potential patients, and restricted citizens' movements as well as international travel.