MONDAY, JANUARY 27, 2020, was a public holiday in South Korea—a carry-over of Seollal, or the Lunar New Year. One of the nation’s most important holidays, this year’s Seollal landed on the calendar two days prior, which meant a rare three-day holiday weekend.
Outside the enormous Seoul train station, Koreans bustled about, enjoying the extra day of festivities in honor of their elders and ancestors, and spending time with family and loved ones.
Inside the station, however, a completely different—and tense—scene was unfolding. Top officials in South Korea’s government hastily called a meeting with more than 20 medical companies. Meetings in train stations aren’t ideal, but the station’s meeting rooms made the most sense logistically for any out-of-town attendees suddenly summoned back to Seoul from their holiday weekend. Their mission: draw up a battle plan to stave off an enemy they couldn’t see, hear, smell, or touch, but that was unquestionably on the march.
Exactly one week earlier, the nation reported its first known COVID-19 case. An infected woman in her 30s traveled from her native Wuhan, China, her fever sniffed out by a thermal scanner upon landing at South Korea’s Incheon International Airport.
Health officials were admittedly nervous a pandemic was on the horizon. Nobody wanted a repeat of 2015, when Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) killed 38 people in South Korea. And judging by how fast the coronavirus was ravaging China, a neighboring trading partner, officials with Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) knew it wasn’t weeks or even days that mattered, but hours.
They also knew from the MERS experience that government alone could not fight the virus’ spread. So, they called a meeting with people from the private sector who could.
After the leaders of nearly two dozen medical companies filed into the Seoul Station conference room and took their seats, the country’s leading health officials cut to the chase: South Korea needed a test that could detect the novel coronavirus, and they needed it immediately. Then government leaders followed their plea for more tests with a pledge to speed up the regulatory approval process however necessary.
As one attendee told Reuters, “We acted like an army.”
The severity of the situation was clear to everyone as they left the meeting. Developing a test for a new virus that’s capable of being mass produced isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible, so the medical companies got to work and government leaders delivered on their promise of speedy emergency-use authorizations. The South Korean regulatory agencies deployed an accelerated approval system implemented in 2016 that would clear the regulatory decks for rapid-fire test development and production. One critical government permission was allowing private biotech firms to use the COVID-19 genetic test code released by China in January.
KCDC approved the first diagnostic test just one week after the meeting. Others soon followed, and in just two weeks, South Korean companies were pumping out 100,000 test kits per day.
Tests, however, mean nothing without diagnostics, which South Korea also prepared for.
During the MERS outbreak, only five state-run facilities handled all the diagnostic work for the MERS tests. But at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, South Korea approved testing capacity at large private hospitals, which meant hundreds of facilities were available for testing as soon as the coronavirus struck. By the end of February, tens of thousands of people a day were getting tested at sites across the country. The testing sites included drive-through sites, which allowed people to stay inside their cars, and specially made testing booths, which allowed doctors to interact and test patients while staying completely separated by protective plastic.
The test offensive paid off. Just as the swift-moving virus sent other countries plunging into varying degrees of chaos, South Korean health officials had collected enough testing data to track the virus’ spread and reduce the new-case counts in a few weeks. South Korean officials also kept hospitals and clinics from becoming overwhelmed by detecting and treating COVID-19 patients early, and sending mild cases to special facilities.
By mid-March—less than two months after the Seoul train station pow-wow—South Korea had tested more than a quarter-million people. The U.S. had tested fewer than 60,000 people by that time.
If that comparison isn’t stark enough on its own, consider this: South Korea and the United States both reported their first coronavirus cases back on that same day in January.
What a difference a meeting makes.