South Korea spends more than 50% budget on Contact Tracing to contain COVID-19
As per WHO, Contact tracing is the process of identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease to prevent onward transmission.
NEW DELHI: Having earned accolades for introducing innovative means such as drive-through/walk-in COVID-19 testing stations to tame the spread of Coronavirus in its country, South Korea also picked up clues from the past experience of checking MERS, EBOLA, and SARS viruses.
South Korean government used more than half of its budget on Contact Tracing – effective use of information technology for collecting mobile phone data for further tracing the movement of the confirmed cases or of the patients under suspicion.
According to Kwon Jun-wook, Deputy Director-General, Korea Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), South Korea effected impressive integration between information technology (IT) and human resource.
“We learned lessons for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) crises in 2015. We not only need to use IT but also data is required to be collected from people’s life such as credit card usages and mobile devices of patience. We collected data from those who have contacted the patients. It is called Contact Tracing. It involves tracing the movement of the confirmed cases or of the patients under suspension. Korea has used more than 50 % of the budget was used for Contact Tracing,” Kwon Jun-wook said while addressing media persons from across the world.
The Korean government has decided to rename KCDC as Disease Control and Prevention Administration and enhance powers too.
The Foreign Press Center Korea (FPCKorea) recently organized an ‘Online International Media Briefing’ in response to very high demand for information from media around the world on the handling of the pandemic by the ROK.
The experts from the Republic of Korea Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) too participated in the briefing.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Contact tracing is the process of identifying, assessing, and managing people who have been exposed to a disease to prevent onward transmission.
“When systematically applied, contact tracing will break the chains of transmission of infectious disease and is thus an essential public health tool for controlling infectious disease outbreaks. Contact tracing for COVID-19 requires identifying persons who may have been exposed to COVID-19 and following them up daily for 14 days from the last point of exposure,” it says.
Korea is also taking to the social distancing guidelines to contain the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak.
According to Korea healthcare experts, the Korean government had issued five principle rules for individuals and also for groups under social distancing guidelines. A total of 31 guidelines were effective in South Korea and the government is reviewing 40 more guidelines and is collecting more opinions from the experts as COVID-19 was a road not traveled by anyone as yet.
When asked about the future plans of the Korean government, Son Youngrae, General Director (strategy and planning), Central Disaster Management Headquarters, Korea Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) said that the Korean government was traveling a new road in social distancing.
“Social distancing is not in the textbooks. The words like lockdown for a couple of months and reducing the mobility of people are in the textbooks. But living daily life with social distancing is going on, and it is an unprecedented trial the government is doing, still, we have to wait and see but the key is to have general public’s participation,” he added.
As per WHO, when systematically applied, contact tracing will break the chains of transmission of infectious disease and is thus an essential public health tool for controlling infectious disease outbreaks.
