The South Koreans employed a workforce of hundreds of epidemiological intelligence officers to track down those who were infected and get them into isolation, or find those who might have been exposed to place them in quarantine while they waited out the incubation period. To support these efforts, South Korea records almost every credit card and bank transaction on government databases. Health agencies were able to legally access this information and combine it with closed-circuit television footage and data from mobile phones to track people’s movements.21 South Korea’s response relied on a
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