Early Laboratory Preparedness of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency and Response to Unknown Pneumonia Outbreak from Wuhan, China, in January 2020.
Il-Hwan KimByung-Hak KangSeung Hee SeoYe Eun ParkGab Jeong KimSang-Won LeeJun Hyeong JangSu Kyoung JoJun Ho JeonJeong Min KimYoon Seok ChungMyung-Guk HanSang-Oun JungJunyoung KimKyu-Jam HwangCheon-Kwon YooGi-Eun RhiePublished in: Annals of laboratory medicine (2021)
We report the response process of the Laboratory Analysis Task Force (LATF) for Unknown Disease Outbreaks (UDOs) at the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) during January 2020 to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which developed as a UDO in Korea. The advanced preparedness offered by the laboratory diagnostic algorithm for UDOs related to respiratory syndromes was critical for the rapid identification of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and enabled us to establish and expand the diagnostic capacity for COVID-19 on a national scale in a timely manner.