Ground-breaking innovation: South Korea turns urban planning system into a virus tracker

The fast response, ahead of many other countries facing outbreaks, was the result of merging South Korea’s advanced methods of collecting information and tracking the virus into a new data sharing system that patches together cellphone location data and credit card records.

The Epidemic Investigation Support System (EISS), introduced in late March, effectively removed technological barriers to sharing that information between authorities, by building on the country’s ‘Smart City’ data system. That platform was originally designed to let local authorities share urban planning information, from population to traffic and pollution, by uploading data in spreadsheets. Now it forms the foundation for a data clearing house that has turbocharged South Korea’s response to the virus.

While personal location and credit card data has been available for use by health investigators for years, previous systems required paperwork to request the data before it was uploaded to analytical software.

That took investigators about two to three days to gather a patient’s personal data to trace their contacts. The new system digitises the entire process, including the requests, and can reduce that time to less than an hour, officials say. Investigators can use it to analyse transmission routes and detect likely infection hotspots.

The system has had some teething problems, and has attracted criticism on privacy grounds, but it has been a major factor in the East Asian nation of 52 mn keeping virus infections at a relatively low 11,122, as of Thursday, with just 264 deaths.

It got its first test with an outbreak in May, traced to the Itaewon district of Seoul known for its night-life, which ended up infecting at least 206 people.

“Faster epidemiological survey means faster discovery of potential patients, which helps contain the spread of the virus even when there’s a massive cluster of infections or people who are asymptomatic, as we’ve seen in the nightclub outbreak,” said Yoon Duk-hee, director for infectious disease management in Gyeonggi Province, a densely populated region near Seoul.

Yoon said she and other authorities used the EISS to trace the movements of the first person detected in the Seoul nightclub outbreak, as he visited a number of places including two nightclubs and three bars.

The system is still reliant on humans operating it to approve and upload data, which can lead to delays. And in some cases, concerns over privacy and security have led to access being so restricted that some local officials said they had to rely on old-fashioned methods.

When another infected person, a 25-year-old man known as Incheon Patient 102, told health authorities that he did not have a job, city officials said they went to the police because the information they wanted to check was not available in a timely manner on the EISS.

The phone’s location data showed he was a teacher at a private academy, where subsequent contact tracing and testing revealed at least 30 other people had been infected, including some of his students and their parents. “There were limitations to the system,” said an official at the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media. “We are now trying to address them after the Itaewon outbreak.”