Weeklong quarantine to stay for another month, criteria not yet met

Social Affairs

Published: 19 Jun. 2022, 16:58

Weeklong quarantine to stay for another month, criteria not yet met

Participants start the Jeju International Tourism Marathon on the southern island of Jeju on Sunday. The event was held full-fledged this year after being suspended for two years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. [YONHAP]

Korea decided to keep the mandatory seven-day quarantine for Covid-19 patients for another four weeks due to fears that rolling back the mandate could accelerate a possible virus resurgence.

The week-long isolation requirement is one of the last remaining Covid restrictions that Korean health officials have yet to scrap, along with the indoor mask mandate, as the nation slowly learns how to live with the virus.

In a virus briefing held Friday, officials at the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters said that although new Covid cases have dropped over the past month, the pace of the current slowdown did not fulfill the conditions needed to ditch the quarantine mandate.

“The number of deaths is not low enough, and if the quarantine mandate is eased, it could accelerate a Covid-19 resurgence and increase the wave of the pandemic,” Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said Friday.

Without quarantining, cases were forecast to spike in July and grow as much as 8.3 times the current level by late August, according to the analysis by the headquarters.

Accordingly, the government said it will maintain the seven-day quarantine mandate at least until July 17 and reassess the situation every four weeks, though it did hint that changes could be made earlier if the quarantine indicators meet the criteria sooner.

The key criteria include maintaining an average daily death toll under 20, a weekly average under 100, and a fatality rate similar to that of the influenza virus, ranging from 0.05 to 0.1 percent.

While the fatality rate met the criteria last month at 0.07 percent, the weekly death toll fell short of the requirement as of the second week of June, with 113.

However, only half of the criteria was met among the supplementary indicators, including Covid-19 forecasting, virus variants and medical capacity.

Given the decrease in cluster infections and overall cases, starting Monday, unvaccinated people will again be allowed to visit nursing hospitals in person.

Face-to-face visits, which were only allowed for those fully vaccinated against Covid-19 or with a virus infection record, will now be possible regardless of their vaccination status.

In addition, with more than 80 percent of nursing home residents and workers given a fourth vaccine dose, people vaccinated with two boosters will be allowed to leave the care home and stay at home overnight.

Visitors are still required to make reservations in advance and submit a negative Covid-19 test result.

Eased visiting restrictions come as Korea’s daily Covid-19 tally recorded 6,071 on Sunday, staying below 10,000 for ten days in a row.

Sunday’s figure went down by 17.7 percent from a week ago, or by 38.2 percent from two Sundays ago.

The number of hospitalized virus patients in severe condition went down by one from the day prior, totaling 70 for the day as of Saturday midnight.

Fourteen more people died of the virus overnight.

BY SEO JI-EUN [seo.jieun1@joongang.co.kr]