Health Policy Commons^™

Learning From The Past: Distributed Cognition And Crisis Management Capabilities For Tackling Covid-19, Seulki Lee, Jungwon Yeo, Chongmin Na

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has presented an unprecedented public health crisis across the globe. Governments have developed different approaches to tackle the complex and intractable challenge, showing variations in their effectiveness and results. South Korea has achieved exceptional performance thus far: It has flattened the curve of new infections and brought the outbreak under control without imposing forceful measures such as lockdowns and travel ban. This commentary addresses the South Korean government’s response to COVID-19 and highlights distributed cognition and crisis management capabilities as critical factors. The authors discuss how the South Korean government has cultivated distributed …