In a televised news conference Wednesday morning, top health officials insisted that social distancing would not make a comeback.
“Social distancing will not be as legally binding as it was in the past,” said Pek Kyong-run, Yoon’s first Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agencies Commissioner.
He said the country’s growing portfolio of vaccines and treatments, and expanded hospital capacity among other factors, provided the basis for navigating the BA.5 phase without mandating social distancing.
Instead high-risk groups would be given priority access to medical resources, and those working with them would be subjected to stricter rules such as regular testing, she said. People in their 50s will be eligible to receive a fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccines, which so far have only been given to people who are at least 60 years of age and older.
South Korea reported 40,266 cases on Tuesday, the highest figure since April 30 following the devastating Omicron surge. The seven-day average of new cases more than doubled to 24,115 from 11,946 seen last week.
Nearly two months after the first cases were detected on May 17, the share of BA5 in sequenced cases has risen to 35 per cent as per the latest analysis by the KDCA.
BA.5 is once thought to be more infectious and immune-suppressive than the earlier omicron subvariant and possibly more pathogenic according to some animal models, which are not yet supported by real-world evidence.
External researchers working with the KDCA estimate that the BA.5 wave could reach more than 100,000 daily cases by September – with more than 1,000 critical care beds occupied by COVID-19 patients at a time. In which about 150 deaths are happening in a day.
Forecasts for the next two months suggest that the coming weeks will not be as bad as the BA.2 and BA.1-led waves that hit earlier this year. In March, when the BA.2 version was raging, an average of 264 deaths were announced every day.
There have been 18,561,861 coronavirus cases through the pandemic as of Tuesday midnight, according to official figures, of which nearly 90 percent occurred on the initial omicron wave earlier this year. South Korea has seen one of the largest BA.2 and BA.1 caseloads globally, with the number of single-day cases hitting 621,148 on March 17.
This means that officially more than a third of the entire South Korean population has been infected at least once. The KDCA says the presence of a high level of immunity has allowed for relief from cases over the past few months.
Since more than 97 percent of eligible adults are fully vaccinated, most Omicron patients had breakthrough-infection and potentially acquired hybrid immunity, which is thought to be stronger than natural or vaccine-induced immunity.
But immunity wears off over time and the soon-to-be-effective BA.5’s ability to dodge former immunity increases the risk of reinfection, the KDCA warned. The proportion of patients with suspected re-infection out of all known patients has gone up from 1.22 per cent in the first week of June to 2.96 per cent by the fourth week.
While Yoon vowed that his approach to COVID-19 would be science-driven, many of the shortcomings in the country’s response system he candidly pointed out, such as a lack of transparency of data, go unheard. Lives.
Dr. Paik Soon-young, an emeritus professor of microbiology at the Catholic University of Korea, said surveillance efforts were “subpar”.
In the first week of July, on an average only around 80,000 tests were conducted in a day, which is far less than the 850,000 PCR tests conducted per day by the government. The KDCA said it was unable to specify how many PCR or RAT tests were being conducted.
From the first week of February, PCR testing has been restricted to people aged 60 and above, which could lead to a substantial proportion of cases being detected by less accurate RATs, experts have worried.
Despite repeated requests from the Korea Herald and other news outlets, the KDCA has not published how many samples of positive patients are being sequenced for different surveillance, and how often. But since samples cannot be collected from patients given RAT, who do not have access to PCR testing, they are potentially not being screened.
by Kim Arin (arin@heraldcorp.com)