I Lived Through the Last Pandemic in South Korea. Have Fellow Journalists Learned Their Lesson?
By Sangmee An
In response to COVID-19, an aggressive test-and-track approach has allowed South Korea to dramatically “flatten the curve” and keep the death rate relatively low. The Korean Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) has tested more than 538,775 people, which amounts to more than 10,165 tests per million inhabitants. By comparison, so far the United States has carried out 3,329 tests per million, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.
It’s too soon to analyze the entire picture in my country. However, one thing is clear: people in South Korea learned to take pandemics seriously from their bitter experience of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2015.
I witnessed this first-hand. On May 20, 2015, around 2 p.m., I was about to leave Samsung Hospital in Seoul after interviewing a stroke patient in his doctor’s office. The camera crew and I saw a couple of doctors rushing towards the emergency center. I wondered whether there had been a traffic accident nearby. Right after we left the hospital, the emergency center was shut down. The hospital confirmed that one of the patients in the ER with MERS. The virus was first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and had been mostly restricted to that country, but had made a frightening outbreak in Korean hospitals.
The first confirmed patient, a businessman in his 50s, came down with MERS after returning from a visit to Saudi Arabia. He had been treated at three local health facilities before he was diagnosed with MERS at Samsung Hospital. The disease looked like severe pneumonia; patients with MERS had gastrointestinal symptoms, and sometimes experienced kidney failure. He had set off a chain of transmission that infected his wife and many patients hospitalized for other ailments, visitors, and hospital staff.
Two days later, a 63-year-old patient in the ICU of the same hospital died of pneumonia. He was confirmed with MERS after his death. A hospital-acquired infection had started even before medical experts figured out where the virus had come from. MERS has a case-fatality rate of almost 35 percent. That makes it much deadlier than COVID-19, which has a death rate that, according to the European CDC’s running tally, is 6.72 percent.
At the time, most South Koreans, including journalists who hadn’t covered pandemics before, were not aware of MERS. The World Health Organization said camels were highly likely to be involved in its spread to humans in the Middle East. In camel-free countries like South Korea, that led to wild social media claims that MERS was contracted by drinking camel milk. But only a few who tested positive had been to the Middle East.
It was the flu season in spring. People with symptoms such as coughing, fever, and shallow breathing marched into emergency rooms at local hospitals. Many of them used public transportation to get to health facilities.
Eventually, all major hospitals in Seoul had to shut down their emergency rooms. It was too late for the KCDC to quarantine those with the disease. And then it became almost impossible to track down and quarantine or at least observe all their recent contacts. During the outbreak, the virus infected 186 and killed 36.
MERS forced the country to reassess its approach to infectious diseases. Demand surged for coordinated public communications with transparent, up-to-date guidelines and data about the pandemic. Legislation enacted since then gave the government authority to collect data from mobile phones and credit cards of those who test positive, in order to reconstruct their recent whereabouts. The information, stripped of personal identifiers, is shared on social media apps that allow others to determine whether they may have crossed paths with an infected person. Healthcare workers in South Korea started to follow the standard public-health playbook: targeted isolation and quarantine of the ill and those with high-risk exposure.
In the case of COVID-19, that preparation appears to have paid off. A majority of citizens learned that early patient detection with accurate tests, followed by isolation, could lower the mortality rate and prevent the virus from spreading. They realized their lack of knowledge about the epidemic might kill other people who were vulnerable to the infection.
Nonetheless, South Korean media was slow to learn the lesson from MERS. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, a reporter from a daily newspaper interviewed the wife of a confirmed patient in her house. A couple of hours later, the wife tested positive and was hospitalized. The reporter tested negative for the virus. But his behavior raised the question of why he needed to meet the patient’s family in person, even though the wife was highly likely to have been exposed to the disease.
During the MERS outbreak, our documentary team decided to make a special program about the virus. While we were reaching out to medical experts who could explain the epidemic, a couple of journalists in local media contacted patients’ families who later tested positive for the virus. They visited the confirmed patients’ homes and interviewed their families and neighbors in person, although it was strictly forbidden to contact anyone who had been exposed to the virus. Most of them didn’t know how to handle the situation and were forced to meet the deadline for daily news. Eventually, my team stopped all filming of medical experts in their hospitals. Instead, we produced a live-air news program to inform the viewers how to prevent further spread of the virus.
Even though the number of COVID-19 cases has dropped sharply in South Korea in the past month, the government reports 967 new cases of returning travelers from overseas. It may be that all the government and medical staff have done is delay the inevitable. Still, even delay seems like a success right now, if only because it gives time to plan and prepare for the next outbreak. But it poses a challenge to the journalists who are covering the outbreak in South Korea — what have journalists learned from the last pandemic?
Sangmee An is a student in the M.A. Class of 2020 at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
