On Wednesday 25 November, 583 new cases of coronavirus infection were recorded in South Korea Health Minister Park Neung-hoo said the country has entered the third wave of the epidemic, after those of March and August. There have been more than 500 new cases for the first time since March, when the infection had spread to South Korea, the first country after China.
While at the end of February Wuhan, the Chinese city from which the coronavirus pandemic started, was in a very strict quarantine for a month, South Korea had managed to stop the growth of infections and effectively contain the spread of the virus. South Korea’s approach fu explicitly praised by the World Health Organization: in proportion to the confirmed infections, deaths from coronavirus-related causes were few, but this was due both to an extensive policy on tampons and to the sophisticated infection tracking system.
If the waves of March and August had started from outbreaks originating from religious groups, for some real sects – in March the faithful of the Protestant church Sarang Jeil in Seongbuk, a district in the north of the capital Seoul, in August those of the Shincheonji congregation of Jesus, a Christian cult with at least 200,000 followers – the third wave is affecting more heterogeneous communities of people in offices, schools, gyms and other small groups scattered around the capital Seoul. This spread in less controllable and identifiable groups of people is making it more difficult to track the infections and therefore their containment.
For this reason, since Monday the government has imposed strict rules of physical distancing in Seoul and surrounding regions after the daily increase in cases began to fluctuate around 300. Strict distancing rules were also decided in the army, and a ban 10 days for soldiers to take leave, after 50 new cases were ascertained in a barracks for training recruits.
This third wave has already exceeded the maximum increase in daily cases, 441, of the second, recorded on 27 August. According to Professor Kim Woo-joo of Korea University Guro Hospital, this third wave was inevitable after the relaxation of physical distancing measures that led people to return to bars, restaurants and to travel freely for more than a month, before authorities restore restrictions.
Kim also said that “unlike the first wave of February and March and the second wave of August and September, when the infections were limited to limited areas, now they occur in many different places at the same time, making the tracking job extremely difficult. of contacts “.
Health Minister Park said he was also concerned about the fact that the percentage of infected between the ages of 20 and 30 has increased, to 28 percent of total cases in the last month. The spread of the infection among young people, many of them asymptomatic, has prompted the government to ask students not to attend schools to prepare for the university entrance exams scheduled for December 3.
Education Minister Yoo Eun-hae said contagions are spreading “in our daily lives, including family reunions and informal gatherings, and this makes it difficult for the government to take preventive action.” It is therefore a very different situation from that of the first two waves in which the government had managed to contain the infection at an early stage, and he had managed to do so without massive quarantine measures, but thanks to an extensive tampon policy and sophisticated contagion tracking.
On 10 and 11 April, when the stricter distancing measures were in force in Italy and other European countries, in South Korea they even voted. 44 million had voted to renew the 300 members of the National Assembly, the country’s unicameral parliament.
South Korea is not the only country facing a third wave of infections. Among others, especially from Asian countries, where the third wave is developing is Japan where, after the peak of 2,514 cases on November 22, the highest ever since the beginning of the epidemic in the country, the government of the capital region Tokyo imposed early closure at 10pm for bars and restaurants which will be in effect for three weeks starting Saturday 28.
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