Jeong Eun Kyeong, South Korea’s Incomparable Contact Tracer

South Korea is raucously democratic and relatively large, with a population not much smaller than Italy’s and a capital that’s bigger and denser than New York City. So its handling of the coronavirus may hold some lessons for the Western democracies that have thus far failed to control it.

Without Jeong, South Korea might not be where it is now. In late February an outbreak was discovered among followers of Shincheonji, a religious group that had just held packed services in the city of Daegu. Its adherents subsequently spread all over, and the church refused to hand over their names. But Jeong persuaded Shincheonji to disclose its members’ identities, allowing her agency to begin testing more than 200,000 of them. She then rolled out one of the most effective contact-tracing regimes in the world. By late March the number of new infections in South Korea was at 100 per day, compared with more than 900 in late February. Daily life has been normal for most of the year, all without a single day of lockdown.