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South Korea Tracks Mobile Phones Over MERS Outbreak
An anonymous reader tips news that South Korea has stepped up its efforts to fight an outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) after the number of known cases keeps increasing rapidly. World health officials are not recommending general travel restrictions, but members of the public are being advised not to do so. Nearly 2,000 schools have been closed, and 2,300 people are in quarantine. The South Korean government is also taking the unusual step of using mobile phones to track which citizens may have been in contact with confirmed MERS patients. The outbreak in South Korea has been traced back to a man who went to multiple medical centers in mid-May seeking treatment for his symptoms. The government is apologizing for its slow response to the situation, and hoping the economic damage won't be too bad.
A few people have died, but they were all elderly, and last I heard, the number was in the single digits. Much like with H1N1 and H1N5, those primarily at risk are the elderly, young children, and those with weakened or impaired immune systems. A generally healthy person, while feeling horribly sick, should have little chance of it being fatal.
I am living and working in Seoul, and much of the day to day life is pretty well normal, even with the school closures and people in quarantine. I have noticed zero change in the normal day-to-day life here, aside from a much larger presence of people wearing masks over their mouths.
Due to people there being less mobile and the gov't having police state-like control over the population, an outbreak in N. Korea will likely be at least as well-contained as in western nations or better.
Anyways if you wanted to kill N. Koreans by intentionally introducing a virus there (germ warfare), MERS is pretty silly. There are tons of more effective biological agents than that.