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.
HIV testing put on backburner amid pandemic
Blood samples in tubes are taken for HIV testing. Gettyimagesbank
By Bahk Eun-ji
By Bahk Eun-ji
With public health centers across Seoul focusing their attention on the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing at state-run clinics is taking a backseat to treating coronavirus infections, raising concerns over possible blind spots in the management of HIV infections and transmission.
According to the Seoul Metropolitan Government, there are only six public health centers in the capital that can offer anonymous HIV testing for free.
The situation outside Seoul is not much different, with most public health centers there also temporarily suspending HIV testing as COVID-19 has been taking up resources since last year.
“The management of HIV and other infectious diseases other than for COVID-19 has become more difficult due to the lack of human resources at public health centers as they are going all out for coronavirus quarantine work,” said an official from the city's infectious disease response department.
The problem is that public health centers play a large role in HIV management, with few medical institutions providing anonymous HIV testing.
Public health centers in Seoul have been conducting free and prompt testing since 2015 for all citizens who wish to be tested for HIV. All processes are conducted anonymously, and the results can be checked in person or by phone 20 minutes after the test.
Due to the nature of HIV/AIDS, anonymous tests are often desired, but when visiting a general hospital, it is inevitable for the patients to expose their personal information.
Jacob Lee, a professor of infectious disease at Hallym University Medical Center, also said anonymous testing at public health centers has been effective in encouraging at-risk people to take the test.
According to statistics from the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), 367, or 30 percent of those 1,222 newly diagnosed with HIV (1,005 Koreans and 217 foreigners) in Korea, were tested through public health centers in 2018.
But since the COVID-19 outbreak, the number of HIV tests conducted at public health centers has dropped sharply.
In Seoul, the number of HIV tests conducted at public health centers stood at 4,641 last year, down 83 percent from 27,406 in 2019.
In March this year, 466 HIV tests were conducted at public health centers, a similar number to the same month last year. The number of new cases of HIV infections last year decreased by 21 percent from a year earlier.
This is not because the actual number of patients has decreased, but because most public health centers have suspended their HIV testing services.
The city government said it is difficult to predict when the anonymous HIV testing service can return to normal again.
“The current COVID-19 situation needs to improve before we can consider resuming HIV testing,” a city official said. “The shortage of workers at public health centers is so serious that it is difficult to proceed with HIV testing right now.”