Placing South Korea’s COVID Practice in Context: Korean Public Health Ambitions, (1959-present)

With the outbreak of COVID, South Korea has received extensive praise for its use of IT technology and contact tracing, placing it along with Taiwan, and a few others, as among the potential models for the crisis. The talk will focus on the possible origin stories underlying this model, while also remaining critical of much of the celebratory narrative. In particular, the talk argues that Korean public health efforts conducted at the national level since the late 1950s deserve the bulk of the credit, with the campaigns targeting malaria, and a wide variety of other pests and parasites. At the same time, the critical part of the talk emphasizes that the approach taken to COVID selectively targets certain groups, and offers numerous concerns for privacy, given the heavy reliance on ICT data.