South Korea yesterday warned of a looming COVID-19 crisis as new outbreaks flared, including one linked to a Protestant church where more than 300 members of the congregation have been infected, but hundreds more are reluctant to get tested.
The outbreak linked to the Sarang Jeil Church in Seoul is the country’s biggest in nearly six months, and led to a tightening of social distancing rules on Sunday.
About 3,400 members of the congregation had been asked to quarantine, South Korean authorities said, as they accused the group’s firebrand conservative leader Jun Kwang-hun — who has reportedly tested positive — of obstruction.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The country’s “trace, test and treat” approach has been held up as a global model in how to curb the virus, but it is now battling several clusters linked to religious groups.
Over the weekend, the capital and neighboring Gyeonggi Province — between them home to nearly half the population — banned all religious gatherings and urged residents to avoid unnecessary travel after a burst of new cases sparked fears of a major second wave.
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) reported 197 new cases in the past 24 hours, mostly in the Seoul metropolitan area, marking its fourth consecutive day of triple-digit increases after several weeks with numbers generally in the 30s and 40s.
The latest cases brought its total infections to 15,515.
“We’re seeing the current situation as an initial stage of a large-scale transmission,” KCDC Director Jeong Eun-kyeong told a briefing.
“We’re facing a crisis where if the current spread isn’t controlled, it would bring an exponential rise in cases, which could in turn lead to the collapse of our medical system and enormous economic damage,” she said.
The outbreak at the Seoul church has revived fears in February when authorities struggled to contain an outbreak that emerged in a secretive Christian sect in the city of Daegu. It became the country’s deadliest cluster.
As in the earlier case, authorities are facing some reluctance to cooperate and difficulty in tracking some of the members of the congregation.
South Korean Vice Minister of Health Kim Gang-lip told reporters that the Presbyterian church had provided inaccurate lists of its 4,000 members, making the testing and isolation procedure “very difficult.”
While 319 of them had tested positive, more than 600 people who authorities want to see in isolation were unaccounted for.
About one in six of the church members tested so far had been positive, “requiring rapid testing and isolation,” Kim said.
Jun, 64, has been organizing anti-government rallies calling for the ouster of South Korean President Moon Jae-in, raising concerns that the virus has been spreading at his protests, too.
He took part in a protest on Saturday in defiance of a government order that all church members self-isolate and get tested.
The church did not respond to calls seeking comment.
The South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare has filed a complaint against Jun for contravening quarantine rules and “obstructing” contact tracing by holding the Saturday rally and failing to provide a full list of members.
Additional reporting AFP
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