South Korea dials up virus testing with hospital ‘phone booths’

SEOUL — A South Korean hospital has introduced phone booth-style coronavirus testing facilities that allow medical staff to examine patients from behind the safety of a plastic panel, the latest innovation in the country’s drive to track down infections.

The row of four booths — which use negative air pressure to prevent harmful particles from escaping outside — stands under a tented shelter outside the H Plus Yangji Hospital in Seoul.

The hospital dubs them the “Safe Assessment and Fast Evaluation Technical booths of Yangji hospital” — or SAFETY for short.

Each patient steps into the box for a rapid consultation by intercom with a medical professional who, if necessary, takes their samples by swabbing their nose and throat using arm-length rubber gloves built into the panel.

The whole process takes about seven minutes and the booth is then disinfected and ventilated.

The smaller SAFETY boxes are “significantly easier” to disinfect than the usual negative-pressure rooms and so are a “much safer space to be tested in,” hospital president Kim Sang-il tells AFP.

South Korea was once the hardest-hit country outside China, where the virus first emerged, but appears to have brought its outbreak under control thanks to a huge testing and contact-tracing effort.

By midnight yesterday almost 300,000 people had been tested — processes that are free to anyone who has been told to have a test by a doctor, or who tests positive.

Early in the epidemic it introduced drive-through testing for the virus, with medical staff in protective suits swabbing noses through car windows, a practice now adopted internationally.

— AFP