These elite contact tracers show the world how to beat Covid-19
In May, when a coronavirus outbreak hit nightclubs in the South Korean capital of Seoul, health officials quickly unleashed their version of the Navy Seals -- elite teams of epidemiologists, database specialists and laboratory technicians.
An old-school, shoe-leather investigation showed the virus had jumped from a night-club visitor, to a student, to a taxi driver and then alarmingly to a warehouse employee who worked with 4,000 others.
Thousands of the employee’s co-workers, their family members and contacts were approached and 9,000 people were eventually tested. Two weeks later, the warehouse flareup was mostly extinguished and infections curtailed at 152.
The work of such so-called Immediate Response Teams offers a look at how South Korea -- once the second worst hit by the coronavirus -- has succeeded in largely quelling its spread without the lockdowns that have derailed lives worldwide. At a time when cities from Los Angeles to Melbourne to Tokyo are grappling with resurgences, South Korea’s playbook offers one of the most successful blueprints yet for containing a disease that’s killed more than 600,000 worldwide.
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