Regional cooperation helps open doors

China, South Korea and Japan contribute to global virus fight

Editor's note: Nations are collaborating in the fight against the novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak to limit the damage to people's health and the impact on the global economy. Here, in the fifth part of a series titled "One World, One Fight", we look at how countries can work together.

After working through the night, Ryan Hong Jun-seo finally goes to bed at 5 am.

But he only sleeps for five hours before resuming work on his website coronamap.live, an interactive map showing confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Korea.

Hong, 19, a computer science student at the University of Melbourne in Australia who is waiting to be called up for mandatory military service in South Korea, developed the website in early February.

Available in Korean, simplified Chinese and English, the site allows a user to check the number of confirmed cases, individual case details－such as a patient's nationality and gender－and routes taken within a certain radius of the user's location. It attracts tens of thousands of daily visits.

While the local population can obtain instant updates from Korean-language portals such as Naver, South Korea's largest search engine, Hong realized the 2.5 million foreigners in the country might not be so well informed.

Wang Sheng, a professor at Jilin University's Department of International Politics in Changchun, capital of Jilin province, said the South Korean government has done well in terms of providing timely updates and transparency of information.

"Using technology, the KCDC numbered each confirmed case, released information about the hospitals patients are confined in, their activity routes before confirmation, and the epidemiological link with other patients," said Wang, who has just returned from South Korea after an educational visit.

A range of apps have been created in South Korea to help the nation fight the outbreak, Wang added. The apps monitor people under self-quarantine, track confirmed cases and check the availability of nearby supplies of face masks.

Following a report on Feb 18 that the 31st confirmed patient in the country, a 61-year-old woman, had attended services at the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu, South Korea's third-largest city, the Christian group became the national epicenter of the outbreak, accounting for about 60 percent of infections.