On May 20^th, 2015, South Korea reported its first laboratory confirmed case of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), caused by the newly emerging beta coronavirus first identified in a patient in Saudi Arabia, in 2012.

The MERS outbreak, which was the largest ever outside the Middle East, was described by the World Health Organization as “large and complex”. This issue caused a huge wave of anxiety all over Korea and its surrounding nations. This anxiety was fueled by discrepancies in information or a lack thereof, along with the rumors that spread like wildfire.

As soon as the KDI School received the news, the school, led by the Student Affairs Division, instantly swung into action. Seeing that information was vital, they started off by putting stringent measures in place to spread awareness, reassure the students, and provide guidelines for suspected cases of MERS on campus. Much needed information was disseminated through the school in a speedy and reliable manner.

The first set of countermeasures was to send mail to the students regarding the facts they needed to know in order to avoid catching MERS. After that, a self-diagnosis list for MERS was sent out to enable students to evaluate themselves. MERS related videos and information were displayed all over the school, from notice boards, to elevators, to the dormitories and all locations on campus with monitors. Surface mails on awareness and prevention were delivered to all rooms in the dormitories, and notices were sent as emails, hosted on the School website and Portal. 

Next, the school lunched a campus wide decontamination in order to remove any viruses that might have entered the entire school grounds.  The school also provided hand sanitizers, masks, and thermometers (complete with guidelines to aid usage). They provided MERS contingency manuals, distributed MERS countermeasure posters and hotline information to all students on campus. Follow up manuals were also created for students who may have visited hospitals that were flagged by the government as potential infectious hubs in order to curb any potential threat of infection.

In the end, the KDI School was successful in keeping all her students healthy and infection free. The swift responses of the KDI School to reassure and protect their student community shows the great value the school placed on the students and must be commended.

In total, there were 186 confirmed cases and 36 deaths from May 20th to July 10th in korea.

By Oluremilekun AKINYEMI [2015 MDP, Nigeria]