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| An ambulance leaves a nursing hospital for the elderly in Gyeonggi Province, in this Oct. 25 photo. Yonhap |
By Bahk Eun-ji
The government has shifted the focus of its COVID-19 quarantine policies from preventing new cases to lowering death rates, the health authorities said Monday.
As the country has changed tack toward coexisting with the coronavirus, government officials are looking at management of the epidemic rather than fighting to defeat the virus outright.
Experts generally evaluated this critical patient-centered response positively, but also pointed out that there are a lack of detailed measures for vulnerable facilities, such as nursing homes for senior citizens, where infection clusters have continued to emerge.
The reasoning behind the easing of social distancing measures by one notch to the lowest level, Oct. 12, which was explained by the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters, Sunday, was sustainability, with the goal of reducing the number of deaths rather than minimizing infections.
In this regard, the capacity to handle patients in a critical condition became a higher priority than the patients with mild symptoms, and the social distancing level was adjusted based on this. In addition, the government decided to minimize the suspensions of operation of facilities when such policies would damage the livelihoods of ordinary people, and ensure social and economic activity for them.
This is the result of taking into account the social and economic costs of keeping social distancing in place at a time when the prolonged pandemic shows no signs of disappearing. Some experts hold the opinion that now is the right time to set an "acceptable level of risk" depending on the capacity of the country's medical system.
Experts generally gave a positive response to the government's change in its quarantine policy.
Kwon Soon-man, a professor at Seoul National University's Graduate School of Public Health, said, "No matter how many daily new cases are detected, the direction of the quarantine policy should be different when the majority of patients are elderly people who have more vulnerable immune systems."
"However, the health authorities have simply focused on confirmed patients regardless of their condition," he added.
The health ministry has announced a plan to carry out virus tests only on employees and users of nursing homes, which is not a measure to prevent infection, Kwon said.
Ki Moran, a professor of the Preventive Medicine Department at the National Cancer Center, said, "Since there were many confirmed patients at medical institutions such as elderly people's nursing homes, we need to respond differently from easing social distancing rules. If there are no further measures for such facilities, it will be difficult to manage the trend there as dozens of newly confirmed patients emerge at the same time."
The latest infections have occurred mostly at nursing homes, hospitals and other facilities, and sporadic community infections have been on the rise from small gatherings, including family meetings, across the country.
According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), the nation added 97 infections, including 79 locally transmitted ones, for Sunday, raising the total caseload to 26,732. The daily new virus cases fell below 100, after the country saw a triple-digit increases over the previous five days.
The latest fall came as fewer tests are usually conducted over weekends than weekdays. The health authorities remained alert as Halloween was one of the major concerns as people gathered in popular nightlife districts such as Hongdae, Itaewon, Shinchon and Gangnam in Seoul.
Among the newly detected locally transmitted cases, 20 were reported in Seoul, 40 in Gyeonggi Province and two in Incheon, west of the capital. Eleven cases were reported in South Chungcheong Province, three in Daegu, and one in North Chungcheong Province. Two additional deaths were reported, raising the total to 468 with a fatality rate of 1.75 percent.
"As the COVID-19 pandemic has continued for more than nine months, the number of patients especially with no symptoms or mild symptoms has been also on the rise," KCDC Commissioner Jeong Eun-Kyeong said during a regular briefing at the Government Complex in Sejong. "In particular during winter, people become more engaged in indoor activities and they could be more frequently exposed to densely populated, closed environments where infectious respiratory diseases are easily spread."
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