When a man in Seoul tested positive for the new coronavirus in May, South Korean authorities were able to confirm his wide-ranging movements in and outside the city in minutes, including five bars and clubs he visited on a recent night out.
FILE PHOTO: People in personal protective equipment walk up a flight of stairs as South Korean job seekers attend an exam conducted outdoors amid social distancing measures to avoid the spread of the coronavirus disease , in Seoul, South Korea, April 25, 2020. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji/File Photo
While personal location and credit card data has been available for use by South Korean health investigators for years, previous systems required physical paperwork to request the data before it was uploaded to analytical software. That took investigators about two to three days to gather a patient’s personal data to trace their contacts.
“Faster epidemiological survey means faster discovery of potential patients, which helps contain the spread of the virus even when there’s a massive cluster of infections or people who are asymptomatic, as we’ve seen in the nightclub outbreak,” said Yoon Duk-hee, director for infectious disease management in Gyeonggi Province, a densely populated region near Seoul.
The phone’s location data showed he was a teacher at a private academy, where subsequent contact tracing and testing revealed at least 30 other people had been infected, including some of his students and their parents. While many countries are scrambling to develop smartphone apps that can trace the contacts of patients without revealing detailed personal information, South Korea has forged ahead with a more invasive approach.
An EISS web portal seen by Reuters showed an interactive map displaying patient movements, with each location data point indicating whether it was collected via credit card or cellphone. People do not have any choice whether their data is collected and accessed, but officials told Reuters that authorities notify anyone whose information is gathered and that all the data will be deleted when the virus is contained.
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