The Republic of Korea’s first 70 days of responding to the COVID-19 outbreak

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a daunting global crisis with profound health, economic, and social impacts felt across the world. As of April 9, 2020, more than 1.5 million positive cases had been confirmed and nearly 90,000 people had died as a result of the virus. As the disease continues to spread, governments are tackling this crisis in different ways, and their efforts are yielding varying results, with some countries continuing to experience increasing numbers of new cases daily and others starting to see a flattening of the growth curve. The Republic of Korea was one of the first countries to respond to COVID-19. The first positive case was identified on January 20, 2020, and daily confirmed cases peaked at 813 on February 29. Since then, the number of new cases has declined until reaching about 100 per day in mid-March. Although it remains uncertain how the crisis will play out over the longer term, Korea’s approach has been effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19. Policy makers and practitioners are asking how Korea has been able to achieve this encouraging outcome while many other countries continue to experience exponential growth in their number of new cases. This case study provides an overview of how Korea responded to the outbreak and how it achieved positive results in containing the disease. As was the case in many countries, the basic elements of Korea’s response to COVID-19 combined using diagnostic testing, tracing contacts, isolating confirmed and suspected cases, providing treatment, and encouraging social distancing. Korea’s sense of urgency, strong implementation capacity, and effective communication and public outreach strategy have distinguished the country’s approach and contributed to its effectiveness. Although Korea’s approach may hold lessons for other countries, it is important to note that some elements may not be directly transferable due to contextual factors including differences in information technology infrastructure, data privacy standards, and health care systems. This case study describes how Korea has undertaken prevention efforts, developed testing kits, tested thousands of people, implemented epidemiological investigations, treated patients, and built the institutional capacity needed to respond to this crisis

Mapping the international health aid community using web data

Abstract International aid is a complex system: it involves different issues, countries, and donors. In this paper, we use web crawling to collect information about the activities of international aid organizations on different health-related topics and network analysis to depict this complex system of relationships among organizations. By systematically collecting co-occurrences of issues, countries, and organization names from more than a hundred websites, we are able to construct multilayer networks describing, for instance, which issues are related to each other according to which organizations. Our results show that there is a surprising amount of homophily among organizations: organizations of the same type (multilateral, bilateral, private donors, etc.) tend to be co-cited in groups. We also create a taxonomy of issues that are generally mentioned together. Finally, we perform simulations, showing that messages originating from different organizations in the international aid community can have a different reach

The International Linear Collider: Report to Snowmass 2021

The International Linear Collider (ILC) is on the table now as a new global energy-frontier accelerator laboratory taking data in the 2030s. The ILC addresses key questions for our current understanding of particle physics. It is based on a proven accelerator technology. Its experiments will challenge the Standard Model of particle physics and will provide a new window to look beyond it. This document brings the story of the ILC up to date, emphasizing its strong physics motivation, its readiness for construction, and the opportunity it presents to the US and the global particle physics community

The International Linear Collider: Report to Snowmass 2021

International audienceThe International Linear Collider (ILC) is on the table now as a new global energy-frontier accelerator laboratory taking data in the 2030s. The ILC addresses key questions for our current understanding of particle physics. It is based on a proven accelerator technology. Its experiments will challenge the Standard Model of particle physics and will provide a new window to look beyond it. This document brings the story of the ILC up to date, emphasizing its strong physics motivation, its readiness for construction, and the opportunity it presents to the US and the global particle physics community

The International Linear Collider: Report to Snowmass 2021

The International Linear Collider (ILC) is on the table now as a new global energy-frontier accelerator laboratory taking data in the 2030s. The ILC addresses key questions for our current understanding of particle physics. It is based on a proven accelerator technology. Its experiments will challenge the Standard Model of particle physics and will provide a new window to look beyond it. This document brings the story of the ILC up to date, emphasizing its strong physics motivation, its readiness for construction, and the opportunity it presents to the US and the global particle physics community

The International Linear Collider: Report to Snowmass 2021

International audienceThe International Linear Collider (ILC) is on the table now as a new global energy-frontier accelerator laboratory taking data in the 2030s. The ILC addresses key questions for our current understanding of particle physics. It is based on a proven accelerator technology. Its experiments will challenge the Standard Model of particle physics and will provide a new window to look beyond it. This document brings the story of the ILC up to date, emphasizing its strong physics motivation, its readiness for construction, and the opportunity it presents to the US and the global particle physics community