SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – South Korea seemed to win the fight against coronavirus: rapidly increasing testing, contact tracking and quarantine efforts paid off when it withstood an early outbreak without the economic pain of ‘a lock. But a deadly resurgence has reached new levels during Christmas week, prompting the search for souls on how the nation fell asleep in a crisis.
The 1,241 Christmas day infections were the largest daily increase. Another 1,132 cases were reported on Saturday, bringing the number of cases in South Korea to 55,902.
More than 15,000 have only been added in the last 15 days. An additional 221 fatalities during the same period, the deadliest stretch, brought the death toll to 793.
As the numbers continue to rise, the clash over people’s livelihoods is deepening and public confidence in the government is eroding. Officials could decide to increase social distancing measures to maximum levels on Sunday, after resisting for weeks.
Tighter restrictions could be inevitable because transmissions have been outpacing efforts to expand hospital capacity.
In the Seoul area, more facilities have been designated for the treatment of COVID-19 and dozens of general hospitals have been ordered to allocate more ICUs to virus patients. Hundreds of troops have been deployed to help locate contracts.
At least four patients have died in their homes or long-term care centers while awaiting admission this month, said Kwak Jin, an official with the Korea Disease Prevention and Control Agency. The agency said 299 of 16,577 active patients were in serious or critical condition.
“Our hospital system will not collapse, but the collapse of patients with COVID-19 has significantly hampered our response,” Choi Won Suk, a professor of infectious diseases at Ansan Hospital at the University of Korea, told west of Seoul.
Choi said the government should have done more to prepare hospitals for a winter wave.
“We have patients with all sorts of serious illnesses in our ICUs and they can’t share any space with COVID-19 patients, so it’s difficult,” Choi said. “It’s the same medical staff that has been fighting the virus all these months. There is an accumulation of fatigue. ”
Critics say President Moon Jae-in’s government was pleased after it quickly contained this spring’s outbreak that focused on the southeastern city of Daegu.
The last few weeks have highlighted the risks of posing economic problems to public health when vaccines are at least months old. Officials had reduced social distancing rules to lows in October, allowing high-risk venues such as karaoke clubs and venues to reopen, although experts warned of a viral increase during in winter, when people spend more hours indoors.
Jaehun Jung, a professor of preventive medicine at Gachon University College of Medicine in Incheon, said he expects infections to gradually slow down over the next two weeks.
The quiet streets and long queues surrounding Seoul’s test stations, which temporarily provide free testing to anyone, regardless of whether they have clear symptoms or reasons to suspect infections, show a return to public alert after months of fatigue. pandemic.
Officials also restrict private social gatherings until Jan. 3, closing ski resorts, banning hotels from selling more than half of their rooms and imposing fines on restaurants if they accept groups of five or more people.
Still, reducing transmissions to levels seen in early November (from 100 to 200 a day) would not be realistic, Jung said, anticipating that the daily figure would be resolved by 300 to 500 cases.
The higher baseline may need narrower social distancing until vaccines are deployed, a terrible prospect for low-income workers and the self-employed who run the country’s service sector, the part of the economy that has the most damaged the virus.
“The government should do everything possible to ensure sufficient supply and advance vaccine administration as soon as possible,” Jung said.
South Korea plans to secure about 86 million doses of vaccine next year, which would be enough to cover 46 million people in a population of 51 million. The first supplies, which will be AstraZeneca vaccines produced by a local manufacturing partner, are expected to be delivered in February and March. Officials expect to complete vaccination between 60% and 70% of the population by November.
There is disappointment that the shots will not arrive sooner, although officials have insisted that South Korea could afford an expected approach, as its outbreak is not as severe as in America or Europe.
South Korea’s previous success could be attributed to its experience in fighting a 2015 outbreak of MERS, the Middle East respiratory syndrome, caused by a different coronavirus.
After South Korea reported its first COVID-19 patient on January 20, the KDCA quickly recognized the importance of mass testing and accelerated an approval process that caused private companies to produce millions of tests in a matter of weeks. .
When infections erupted in the Daegu region in February and March, health authorities managed to contain the situation in April after aggressively mobilizing technological tools to track contacts and enforce quarantines.
But this success was also a product of luck: most infections in Daegu were related to a single ecclesiastical congregation. Healthcare workers now have much more difficulty tracking transmissions in the populated area of the capital, where clusters appear almost everywhere.
So far, South Korea has resisted its outbreak without blockades, but a decision Sunday to lift distance restrictions to the highest “Tier-3” could possibly close hundreds of thousands of non-essential companies across the country.
That could be the best, said Yoo Eun-sun, who struggles to pay the rent for three small music tutoring academies he runs in Incheon and Siheung, also near Seoul, amid a shortage of students and interrupt and shutdown stops.
“What parents would send their children to piano lessons” unless transmissions slow down quickly and decisively, he said.
Yoo also believes that the government’s middle approach in relation to social distancing, which has been aimed at specific business activities and which keeps the wider part of the economy open, has placed an unfair financial burden on companies like its own.
“Whether it’s tutoring academies, gyms, yoga studios or karaokes, the same set of companies are successful over and over again,” he said. “How long could we continue?”