South Korea's Successful Battle To Flatten The Curve

South Korea's recent efforts at slowing the spread of COVID-19 shows what it actually means to flatten the curve. On February 21, the country had 21 new confirmed cases of the illness and that grew to 449 by February 27. Just one week later, there were 909 new cases of the coronavirus. The authorities moved quickly to roll out extensive testing, tracing and isolation measures as well as innovative drive thru testing areas.

On March 03, the number of new daily cases fell to 686 and the figure declined further to 131 just a week later. In recent days, that positive trend has generally continued. Over the past week, the number of new daily confirmed cases has only gone above 100 once and that was yesterday when there were 152. Today's figures are more positive, however, with 87 new cases.

The cumulative number of confirmed cases in South Korea stood at 8,652 today, of which 6,325 are currently in isolation and 2,233 have recovered. The vast majority of COVID-19 cases were in the city of Daegu but authorities are also closely monitoring another small cluster of infections in Seoul.