South Korea: no new deaths from coronavirus; 3 months since the country’s first infection, new cases are now in single digits.

This week, South Korea reported no new deaths from coronavirus. Three months since the country’s first reported infection, new cases per day are now in single digits.

Remarkably, South Korea has not resorted to a strict lockdown to tame the pandemic. Instead, it has rigorously followed three guiding principles: test, trace and contain.

The UK has, belatedly, adopted a similar strategy. But for it to work, the government needs to massively scale up testing – which has been beset by flaws and delays.

We made headlines earlier this week when we reported on how the UK’s coronavirus tests have some serious problems.

Alarmingly, the Department of Health and Social Care responded to our story by attempting to discredit it on social media, even though our reporting was backed by a leaked document from Public Health England. Health Minister Helen Whately herself later admitted that the tests were “not up to scratch”.

Following up yesterday, we reported that leading researchers had been warning that the tests were inferior for almost two months.

The news comes as the UK is falling far short of the 100,000 tests pledged by the end of April.

We believe that holding the government to account on this issue is vital. Which is why we were pleased to see the exact same story, based on the same leaked document, lead the Telegraph front page two days later. But less so that it was billed as the Telegraph’s own exclusive story(!)

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