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Ho Song was hospitalized 19 days in a public hospital in Seoul
Ho Song’s 45-year life was reversed shortly after arriving in South Korea in late March.
The merchant had gone to the country to visit his parents in the capital Seoul and buy equipment for his restaurant in Brazil, where he has lived since he was 12 years old.
But he discovered six days after landing that he had been infected with the new coronavirus. Local authorities suspect that this happened during the trip.
His experience helps to understand why South Korea has become a benchmark in the fight against the covid-19 pandemic, even without resorting to quarantine, starting from the moment Ho set foot in the country.
Mobile monitoring
All arriving passengers need to install a program on their cell phone, informing them every morning if they have any symptoms.
The app tracks the person’s location, and the non-responder receives a call from the government to confirm that everything is fine.
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An ambulance arrived at Ho’s home within 30 minutes of receiving the result.
Ho noticed on the fourth day that there was something wrong. At first he thought that tiredness and diarrhea could be the result of the long plane ride or the time difference.
“But the next day, I saw that this was not normal and I called the number reported by the application and scheduled to do an exam the same day,” says Ho.
Mass testing
Unlike in Brazil, where government testing is restricted to those with more severe symptoms, anyone can be tested in South Korea at more than 630 centers.
Until May 4, the country had carried out around 633 thousand tests, which is equivalent to 12.3 tests for every thousand inhabitants.
In comparison, Brazil had made until April 20, according to the most recent data from the Ministry of Health, 0.63 per thousand inhabitants.
The exam in South Korea takes about ten minutes to complete, and the result comes out in 24 hours.
Ho received a call from the health post the morning after the test. He says that from then on everything happened very quickly.
Track contacts
In the same call in which he learned of the positive result, he was informed that he should be ready in half an hour to be taken to the hospital.
Another ambulance would pick up her parents for the test. And a third team would decontaminate their home. “It was all very fast, synchronized and systematic. It looked like a movie scene,” says Ho.
While Ho was preparing, he received calls from officials from different government agencies, who asked him where the merchant had been in the past few days.
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Ho was treated in a public hospital, where he was isolated in a room with cable TV, a refrigerator, and a bathroom.
The goal was to take pictures from security cameras of the places he had passed and identify the people he had come into contact with when trying to buy a thermometer at a pharmacy or when going to and from the exam center by bus.
They would be screened and also tested for covid-19 to prevent the virus from continuing to spread.
Free treatment
Ho was taken to a public hospital and told that all treatment was free. It was totally isolated in a room with cable TV, fridge and bathroom. “I couldn’t even open the window for air,” he recalls.
Health professionals only came to take him for an exam, always covered by personal protective equipment.
He was the one who had to control his health while hospitalized. “They left all the measuring equipment in the room and taught me how to use it myself so they didn’t have to go into the room,” says Ho.
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Ho had pneumonia and was only discharged after symptoms ended and two consecutive negative tests
The merchant spent 19 days in the hospital and was diagnosed with pneumonia, which turned out not to be very serious.
While in the hospital, he performed six tests for covid-19 and was only discharged after two consecutive negative tests on consecutive days with no signs of pneumonia.
SMS alerts
On a public website, each patient like Ho is identified by a number, which reports the person’s date of birth, the likely place of infection, the neighborhood where he lives, and the hospital to which he was taken.
The government alerts residents of the region where someone infected lives or has been by text message.
A person can verify the route the patient took and when to find out if he or she came into contact with an infected person and, if so, perform the test.
This monitoring system, along with mass testing, is cited as one of the main reasons why South Korea has managed to dramatically reduce the number of new cases of coronavirus.
The country became the second most affected in the world in mid-March, but today it has the 38th highest number of cases, with 10,800 confirmed infections and 254 deaths.
Control vs. Privacy
On Monday, there were only three new cases in South Korea, all imported. It was the lowest number in almost three months.
Little by little, life begins to normalize in the country. Baseball games are back, but without an audience. And classes will gradually resume from next week.
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Trader says people agree to give up a little privacy to fight a virus
Ho believes this was only possible because the population agreed to give up some privacy.
He says most South Koreans consider it necessary today, after another Mers coronavirus epidemic in 2012, in which South Korea was the worst affected country outside the Middle East.
“At the time, there was no such control, and the government was heavily criticized for failing to track down people who were contaminated. That is why this system exists today, and people no longer say it is an invasion of the privacy, because they understand that without this there is no way to stop the virus from spreading. “
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