South Korea plans to stop using GPS monitoring to enforce quarantines, and is also ending daily checkup calls to low-risk COVID-19 cases as the fast-spreading Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 overwhelms health and government workers.
The speed of transmissions has made it impossible to maintain a tight medical response, Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency commissioner Jeong Eun-kyeong said yesterday.
The agency reported 38,691 new cases of the virus, a nine-fold increase from levels seen last month, when Omicron became the country’s dominant strain.
Photo: Bloomberg
Jeong said that the country could see daily jumps of 130,000 or 170,000 by late February.
South Korea had been seen as a success during the earlier part of the pandemic, after it contained infections and hospitalizations more effectively than most countries in the West. Health authorities worked closely with biotech companies to ramp up laboratory tests, and aggressively mobilize technological tools and public workers to trace contacts and enforce quarantines.
However, the country’s strengths have been rendered irrelevant by the unprecedented spike in infections fueled by the Omicron variant, which has stretched health and administrative resources.
Officials had already been forced to expand at-home treatments, reduce quarantine periods, and reshape testing policy around rapid antigen test kits, despite concerns over their reliability, to save laboratory tests for people at higher risk due to age or pre-existing medical conditions.
The plans to further ease monitoring and quarantines came as health and public workers struggle to keep up with the near 150,000 people being treated at home for mild or moderate symptoms, which have led to delays in drug prescriptions and has paralyzed contact tracing.
Officials say that public workers who had been monitoring virus carriers through GPS-enabled smartphone apps are now to be assigned to help with at-home treatments.
Virus carriers will no longer be required to report to local health offices when they leave home to visit doctors, while their cohabiting family members can now freely go out to buy food, medicine and other essentials.
Low-risk virus carriers in their 50s or younger, and have no pre-existing medical conditions, will now be left to monitor their conditions on their own and contact local hospitals if their symptoms worsen. Health workers are still to make daily checkup calls to people in their 60s and older, or to those with pre-existing conditions.
“We are planning to transition toward an anti-virus strategy that’s concentrated on maintaining essential social functions while dealing with huge numbers of infections and people placed under quarantine,” Jeong said.
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