Quarantine Responses to New Infections in Foreign Countries

Division of Quarantine Support, Center for Infectious Disease Control, CDC Jun Yeo-Jin, Son Tae-Jong, Hong Sung-jin

Since the reorganization of the national preventive system in 2015, domestic quarantine management has been improved by utilizing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to manage suspicious patients at the quarantine stage. Various measures were implemented such as expansion of quarantine and diagnosis infrastructure, construction of smart quarantine information system, and operation of a quarantine system for entrants. In particular, as the domestic outbreak of MERS started, the reorganization of the national preventive system changed the paradigm of the range of quarantine management from “one-sided surveillance” screening for symptoms at the entry to expansion of surveillance system for screening entrants during the infectious disease incubation period. Guidance on prevention of infectious diseases in immigration was also provided and immigration information was shared with medical institutions. In this study, we introduce the quarantine management that has been changed since the MERS outbreak and which responded to the new infectious diseases that can be imported abroad.