South Korea seems to be stuck in an endless cycle of loosening restrictions, watching cases go up, and then having to tighten them up again and close businesses

South Korea seems to be stuck in an endless cycle of loosening restrictions, watching cases go up, and then having to tighten them up again and close businesses. It's not clear that it's even possible to use contact tracing to stop Covid-19 spreading (the evidence is very thin and dubious), but I'm not convinced they've got widespread enough testing to make it work if it is feasible - they don't seem to have expanded testing since about March, they've been doing a tenth of many tests a day in per-capita terms as the US, US, and the big EU states lately, and the way they seem to be managing this is by not routinely testing people with mild potential symptoms like other countries have been. Which means they have very limited ability to detect infections not linked to cases they know about, and contact tracing does nothing to stop those unknown, undetected infections from spreading. It just so happens the proportion of cases with no known ties to existing cases has been going up there lately. This is, of course, not the impression you'd get from news coverage in the UK or US, which is still generally spinning South Korea as a test and trace success story that demonstrates how badly our governments have failed. Hilariously, the Guardian even turned the fact that they were doing less Covid-19 testing than the UK into a positive the other day, describing them as a demonstration of how important targeted testing was.