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Hate is a Virus: A Foreigner’s Perspective on the Pandemic in South Korea
Although the one-year anniversary of the global pandemic declaration has passed, this week marked one year of COVID-19 impact for our household. One year ago this week, the “distant” pandemic became real, as Peter’s university quickly made the decision to go on-line and the hospital where I worked began scrambling for PPE and isolation rooms for patients we knew would present with the novel coronavirus. My gym closed, our church stopped all in-person meetings, and our plans with friends were canceled. It all got very real, and that was before we witnessed the overwhelming loss of human life that was to come. Experiencing the effects of a pandemic first in…
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Adventure #2: How we traveled 6,700 miles for COVID tests (Part 2)
Part 1 of this post described our unsuccessful attempt to get tested for COVID-19 before leaving Philadelphia. What we found in Seoul is a completely different response system and a different set of priorities for managing the pandemic crisis. Here is the rest of our testing story, preceded by some background information I had fun researching. According to Business Insider, in early March the U.S. “had done fewer COVID-19 tests per capita than many other countries with large coronavirus outbreaks.” Conversely, by February 28, just a few weeks after identifying the first case of COVID-19 in South Korea, that country was able to conduct up to 15,000 tests per day.…
