COVID-19: South Korea Shows How IT can be Effective When Combined with Rigorous Testing

Summary Bullets:

• South Korea’s strategy to combat COVID-19 has relied on a combination of extensive testing and the use of IT to enforce widespread tracing, monitoring, and quarantine.

• Government-initiated mobile phone applications have helped local authorities with limited personnel to manage large numbers of quarantined people.

Although South Korea was one of the earliest countries to experience a major outbreak of COVID-19, the country has recently seen a significant daily decline in the number of new cases. Meanwhile, although the number of deaths attributed to the virus recently saw a slight rise, this followed a long period during which there had been no increase. Other countries are now looking at South Korea to understand what they can learn from its COVID-19 experience.

COVID-19: Communication Providers Step Up to Utilize Blockchain for New Use Cases, Including Helping People Impacted by the Outbreak

K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

• Blockchain use cases are evolving, including new systems devised by service providers to help during the COVID-19 pandemic. Alibaba’s use of blockchain for more efficiently distributing financial payments to affected parties is a good example.
• The industry has also seen an uptick in other telecom providers’ involvement in the blockchain market, resulting in a number of deployments aimed at improving business processes and enhancing service offerings.

Blockchain holds promise as an enabler for service providers for a wide range of internal and external (customer-facing) use cases, ranging from IoT and mobile device security to payments, supply chain management, asset tracking, and logistics. Retail, manufacturing, and healthcare companies have been identified as the most likely industries to take advantage of these capabilities, but there are many companies that can benefit from the secure trusted ledgers enabled by blockchain. At the same time, during the world’s COVID-19 pandemic, early blockchain use cases are appearing as parts of efforts to help combat the crisis, including Alibaba’s use of blockchain for more efficiently distributing financial payments to affected parties.