Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

When COVID-19 arrived five years later, Khan said, “I guess maybe it was raw for them.” South Korea reacted fast to the news out of China, on January 3, 2020, with screening and quarantine measures for travelers from Wuhan. Thanks to those measures, the country’s first case was detected on January 20, 2020, in a woman from Wuhan disembarking at Incheon International Airport. The government raised its crisis-management alert level from Blue to Yellow, and then a week later from Yellow to Orange. Also, on January 27, health officials summoned representatives from twenty medical companies to meet at a train station in Seoul and discuss creation of the tools for response, including privately developed diagnostic tests, with guarantees that those tests would get fast regulatory approval. Officials of the Republic of Korea took this outbreak seriously from the start. Their response was strongly in contrast to what happened and didn’t happen, for instance, in the United States, which had its first detected case on January 19, one day before South Korea’s.