Places like New York and Italy that had big early COVID-19 outbreaks generally ended up with higher death tolls than places that were better-prepared for the virus by the time it arrived.

But then there’s South Korea, which in the early phases of the pandemic was one of the countries that suffered the most. But then, unlike the United States — and also unlike Asian success stories that closed their borders rapidly and simply never had a big outbreak — Korea actually triumphed over the virus and beat it. Dylan Scott has an article out in Vox that tells the tale and I strongly recommend it, mostly because it serves as a searing expose of how phenomenally stupid the COVID-19 debate in the United States has been.

South Korean officials made a plan. They needed to test as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, to figure out how bad the outbreak was. Then they had to find out who might have come into contact with the infected people. And they needed all of those people — both the …