By Kim Minji

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has commended Korea as a model for responding to the COVID-19 outbreak.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on March 18 told a news conference at his organization's headquarters in Geneva, "A month ago, the Republic of Korea was faced with accelerating community transmission. But it didn't surrender."

"It developed an innovative testing strategy and expanded lab capacity; it rationed the use of masks."

He said, "(Korea) did exhaustive contact tracing and testing in selected areas; and it isolated suspected cases in designated facilities rather than hospitals or at home," adding that as a result, the number of confirmed cases has decreased.

Saying his organization is working with other countries on community transmission to apply the lessons learned from Korea to other areas, he also said trials of the first vaccine for the coronavirus has begun.

"WHO and its partners are therefore organizing a study in many countries in which some of these untested treatments are compared with each other," he added.

kimmj7725@korea.kr