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Crisis Learning and Flattening the Curve: South Korea’s Rapid and Massive Diagnosis of the COVID-19 Infection

Crisis learning is critical for ensuring that better actions are taken for an impending or a future crisis. Learning from past epidemics enables public health authorities to assess aspects of the overall response system to improve the system. Moreover, learning during a crisis makes it possible to develop an approach to address unique and rapidly evolving epidemic situations. In this study, the literature was reviewed, and interviews were conducted with a director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and a regulatory manager of a multinational medical equipment company. On the basis of that research, this article examines how crisis learning has facilitated a South Korean disease control agency’s surveillance of infectious diseases and its development of in vitro diagnosis kits. Those kits enabled qualified private health providers to diagnose COVID-19 infections in cooperation with multiple partners in the early period of the outbreak response. The agency’s learning from a past epidemic crisis, shared sense-making, and proactive efforts helped the nation to flatten the curve of the numbers of the confirmed cases in a short period of time. This study provides insights for national public health authorities tackling infectious disease outbreaks.