USFK is now able to conduct their own coronavirus testing:
American flags wave alongside coronavirus banners outside Camp Humphreys, South Korea, Monday, March 16, 2020.
With the number of infections soaring in South Korea after a February outbreak in Daegu, U.S. Forces Korea restricted access to bases, implemented health checks at entry gates and ordered service members to avoid nonessential activities and travel outside the base.
However, USFK didn’t have the ability to conduct its own tests. It initially had to outsource patients and samples to an overwhelmed South Korean health system.
That changed on March 7 when the military stood up its own lab at the new hospital that opened last year on Camp Humphreys, allowing it to ramp up testing.
You can read more at the link, but of interest is that 250 USFK servicemembers and civilians have been tested with only 9 so far coming up positive. The lab at Camp Humphreys is also conducting only 10 test a day with the capacity to do about 80 if needed.
If possible maybe some of these test kits need to be shipped to the U.S. to help out there.
Ambulance disinfectionA paramedic disinfects an ambulance used to transport a COVID-19 patient at the former site of a water purification plant in western Daegu on March 22, 2020. (Yonhap)
On top of the coronavirus test they will also be held in quarantine for 14 days:
Passengers who arrived at Incheon International Airport, west of Seoul, aboard a flight from Frankfurt, Germany, head to where they can be tested for the new coronavirus on March 22, 2020, as the South Korean government tightened its quarantine procedures for inbound travelers from Europe to prevent any inflow of the virus from outside. (Yonhap)
South Korea on Sunday began conducting new coronavirus tests on all arrivals from Europe and requiring even those with negative results to undergo a 14-day self-quarantine as part of efforts to prevent any inflow of the virus from outside.
Starting at midnight, the government set in motion the screening measure for both its citizens and foreigners, amid growing concerns over a steady rise in the number of imported COVID-19 cases.
On Sunday, more than 8,510 people are to arrive in Korea from overseas. Of them, about 1,000 are from Europe, which has become a new front line in the global fight against the virus, with Italy having clocked more than 4,820 deaths.
I think all of us who closely follow Korea issues have noticed how the foreign press will not report on Moon administration scandals that are very similar and arguably worse than what former President Park Geun-hye was impeached for. This is in stark contrast to the massive interest the foreign press showed during the timeframe prior to the impeachment of President Park.
B.R. Myers
Well now ROK Drop favorite Professor B.R. Myers shares his opinion on why this is:
1) Since Trump was elected, most Western correspondents feel a moral duty to root openly for whatever main political figure in the host country they consider less Trump-like, who in this case is Moon. The same “mirror imaging” dictates that they root against South Korea’s main opposition party, to which they occasionally apply the label “far right,” although it’s well to the left of our Republicans, and most of its members voted in favor of impeaching Park in 2016.
2) When deciding which local stories merit attention, correspondents (and perhaps their editors) seem to follow the lead of the New York Times’ bilingual correspondent Choe Sang-hun, whose own record of stories over the past 10 or so years parallels the agenda of the once-opposition, now staunchly government-loyal Hankyoreh newspaper he used to write for. The language barrier also forces correspondents to rely on local assistants and interns who, like most young people here, get their news from the Naver portal, which has ties to the Blue House and steers clear of stories riling up the Moon-critical half of the country.
3) Foreign journalists are as reluctant as their local colleagues to annoy Moon’s excitable netizen base, especially since the orchestrated attacks in 2019 on a South Korean journalist for Bloomberg who had referred to his reputation in some quarters as a “spokesman for Pyongyang.” (The chairman of the ruling party denounced her as “a black-haired foreigner” for her “borderline traitorous” article.)
You can read much more at the link, but Professor Myers goes on to explain how the foreign media is giving favorable reporting to the Moon administration for how they are handling the coronavirus outbreak despite weeks of problems that Koreans were highly upset about similar to what you seeing going on in the U.S. now. The foreign media is also helping the Moon administration to scapegoat the Shincheonji Church for the coronavirus outbreak problems as well.
I would say that this is what unemployment insurance is for instead of implementing a universal basic income:
An employee wearing a mask cleans the widows of a shoe store in Seoul, Sunday, March 8, 2020. Despite the economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, most Koreans say they oppose an anti-disaster basic income.
Nearly 60 percent of Koreans say they oppose introducing a universal basic income in response to the economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to a survey conducted on Friday by Embrain Public, a local pollster, 57.6 percent of those questioned said they were against giving every citizen 1 million won ($830), while 39.8 percent said they were in favor. The rest (2.6 percent) did not respond.
Among supporters of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, 57.7 percent were in favor of the idea, whereas 81.5 percent of the main opposition United Future Party were against it.
The findings come as politicians across the country discuss the need for support for people whose businesses have been hit hard by COVID-19.
Hopefully this gives people cautious optimism that the worst of the coronavirus spread will be over once the temperatures warm:
A man wearing a face mask, amid fears over the spread of the COVID-19 novel coronavirus, walks past cherry blossom trees at Ueno park in Tokyo on March 12, 2020. AFP
The virus that causes Covid-19 may have a temperature sweet spot at which it spreads fastest, a new study has suggested, but experts say people should avoid falling into the trap of thinking it will react to seasonal changes in exactly the same way as other pathogens, like those that cause the common cold or influenza.
The study, by a team from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, the capital of south China’s Guangdong province, sought to determine how the spread of the new coronavirus might be affected by changes in season and temperature.
Published last month, though yet to be peer-reviewed, the report suggested heat had a significant role to play in how the virus behaves.
“Temperature could significantly change Covid-19 transmission,” it said. “And there might be a best temperature for viral transmission.”
The “virus is highly sensitive to high temperature”, which could prevent it from spreading in warmer countries, while the opposite appeared to be true in colder climes, the study said.
As a result, it suggested that “countries and regions with a lower temperature adopt the strictest control measures”.
This was a Chinese study, so like with any information coming from China be suspicious of its accuracy:
People with type A blood are more likely to catch coronavirus while those with type O seem more resistant, a preliminary study of about 2,000 patients in China showed.
A team of Chinese researchers, led by Wang Xinghuan from the Centre for Evidence-Based and Translational Medicine at Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, conducted the study.
They took blood group patterns of patients in Wuhan and Shenzhen and compared them to local healthy populations. They found that blood type A patients showed a higher rate of infection and tended to develop more severe symptoms.
In the general population, type O blood (34 percent) is more common than type A (32 percent). But in the infected, this was reversed, with type O people at 25 percent and type A at 41 percent. People with type O blood made up 25 percent of deaths in the research. Normally, people with type O blood account for 32 percent Wuhan’s population.
Whole-body sterilizerCitizens use a whole-body sterilizer set up at a subway station in Daegu, 300 kilometers southeast of Seoul, on March 16, 2020, amid the coronavirus crisis. (Yonhap)
This has to be the stupidest way we have seen the coronavirus spread in South Korea:
A new cluster of coronavirus has emerged at a church in South Korea after members used a saltwater spray — which they believed prevented the spread of the virus — but used the same spray bottle on members without properly disinfecting the nozzle, health officials acknowledged Monday.
Officials in the city of Seongnam, located in the Gyeonggi Province south of Seoul, said 40 additional members of the River of Grace Community Church have tested positive for COVID-19 after six members, including the pastor and his wife, were confirmed in the past week to have the virus.
All of those infected may have attended the same service on March 8, according to the Yonhap News Agency. (……..)
“This made it inevitable for the virus to spread,” he added. “They did so out of the false belief that saltwater kills the virus.”
You can read more at the link, but I don’t know what is worse, the minister believing that salt water kills COVID-19 or all the followers blindly following his instructions to use the spray bottle on each other?
You would think someone in the congregation would think this is idiotic.
