Let me get back to the main points. I was going to talk about three points in my presentation. First, we have had partnerships between scholars and officials of the Korean and Canadian governments since last March. Second, based on this partnership we have crafted, especially as we are going through this difficult time across the globe, we need to come up with an exit strategy. I'm going to talk about some data science and AI-based innovation in the digital economy. Finally, I'll talk about the next steps we can take to further enlarge and accelerate this Korea—Canada partnership.
When it comes to the first point of this partnership between Canada and Korea in the past several months, I'll talk about the important modelling activities we have done so we can plan things accordingly. Professor David Fisman and his research team based at University of Toronto and the Statistics Research Institute and many other research institutions based here in Korea have worked together since last March. We can model the course of this pandemic and then forecast some marginal data, and so we can plan a lot of things in advance.
As I recollect, the past several months this so-called idea-based model has been working really well, and we are able to forecast the maximum number of new cases we might have across Korea and in certain regions and the lowest point of the daily cases we are going to have, so we can plan a lot of non-pharmaceutical interventions accordingly. Because when you know the near future you are in good shape and can plan a lot of policy-making better.
For example, when you know how serious this epidemic is going to be and the extent to which it is going to impact families and kids, you can better plan all this online learning and school openings. When you have this kind of information you can encourage some of the teleworking sooner rather than later. When you know the course of the epidemic, you can find a good time to start mass gatherings, so the economy can still go on.
Those are the main lessons and the benefits we have learned from each other when we did this modelling together.
My colleague David Fisman and his research team also have picked up what we have gone through in the past several months when it comes to non-pharmaceutical interventions. This was the give-and-take, a very healthy exchange and partnership, so we can learn from each other and can handle our crisis better with data, evidence and science-based approaches.
I'll talk a bit about the non-pharmaceutical interventions we have institutionalized and have made best practices among the public. When we knew the three factors that affect non-pharmaceutical interventions, we tried to reduce the probability of infection at the personal level by encouraging the use of masks from the start, back in February, and hand-washing hygiene.
Second, when it comes to the societal level of nonpharmaceutical intervention, we knew that social distancing should be a very effective measure. Rather than waiting, we actually had sort of a proactive measure, a proactive sort of implementation of social distancing—like virtual education, teleworking and preventing mass gatherings—way in advance, back in March, so that this epidemic would not be as large as what other countries have gone through.
Third, this government-level intervention is using the 3T: testing kits, ICT-based tracing mechanisms, and treating patients with very good practices. We call this a 3T framework, and it has been working pretty well based on ICT-based tools, ICT-based guidance and a lot of these innovations that we started way in advance. That's the short of the main point.
When it comes to the second point I was going to tell you about, the exit strategy that we are considering at the moment, we've been actually discussing the so-called dynamic distancing. Once you know the cycle.... You know that this is kind of going down, but you're still uncertain whether it is going to come back, and you have this economy that you need to manage. You cannot simply lock down the whole country; you cannot continue to have a lot of the social distancing. We have come out with this sort of dynamic distancing, on and off. We keep the balance between a component of the economy to keep going and a moderate level of social distancing, while we have some other personal-level and government-level interventions in place. That's what we call dynamic distancing, and it's been working pretty well so far.