Bahk Eun-ji has been with The Korea Times since 2012, building a career across multiple desks. She began at the Business Desk, where she conducted in-depth interviews with key figures in Korea's corporate world. Later, she moved to the Politics & City Desk, focusing on education policy and social affairs. She later served as team leader of the digital content team, leading curation efforts on the newspaper’s homepage and reshaping print stories for social media audiences to enhance digital reach. Now back on the Politics Desk, she covers the National Assembly and the Ministry of National Defense, with a renewed focus on political developments.
Calls grow for tougher social distancing measures amid increasing infections
People walk under cherry blossoms on a street along Gyeongpo Lake in Gangneung, Gangwon Province, Sunday, although fears of COVID-19 transmissions are growing. Yonhap
By Bahk Eun-ji
By Bahk Eun-ji
Calls are rising for the government to strengthen the country's social distancing measures as the current levels have failed to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Seoul Capital Area (Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province) is presently at Level 2, while the rest of the country is at Level 1.5, in the five-tier social distancing scheme.
Last week, the daily caseload hovered over 500, as the country has been observing sporadic infection clusters across the country in various locations.
Due to fewer tests being conducted on weekends, the daily caseload fell back slightly below 500 for Sunday to 473 cases, including 449 local infections, according to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), Monday. But KDCA Commissioner Jeong Eun-kyeong said the daily number could rise much higher than the current around-500 daily cases, adding that one patient infects more than one person on average.
“The use of public facilities has played a role in the cluster infections in non-metropolitan areas,” Jeong said in a media briefing. “If quarantine measures are not tightened, the nation is likely to seek an increasing trend of infections.”
With the rate of spread showing no signs of letting up, an increasing number of people are calling for strengthening the country's anti-virus measures.
According to a survey conducted by Realmeter of 500 people aged 18 and older, 73.2 percent of the respondents said they agreed on raising the social distancing level, while 24.7 percent of respondents were opposed to it.
In this regard, health authorities are also evaluating the current situation in order to decide what steps to take next, as they say the country is standing at a crossroads of a large-scale resurgence of the coronavirus.
“Reviewing our experience over the past year, the current situation has many similarities to that of just before the pandemic really took hold,” Health Minister Kwon Deok-chul said in a press briefing on Sunday.
“If the increasing trend shows no signs of abating, the daily caseload can expand to more than 1,000 people a day in a short period of time. Now that there are signs of a resurgence again, we ask people to follow the quarantine rules and to keep good personal hygiene, such as always wearing masks and washing hands frequently.”
The government plans to announce new social distancing guidelines on Friday that will be applied starting next Monday.
In the meantime, the government has concluded that two cases of allergic reactions were highly likely to be connected to the COVID-19 vaccine. The investigation team reviewed three anaphylaxis cases for people who received COVID-19 vaccines, and determined on Monday that two were linked to the vaccine.