[ad_1]
Seoul: South Korea reported a record 950 daily coronavirus cases on Saturday (December 12), surpassing the peak in late February 909, with the president calling the country’s third wave of COVID-19 an “emergency.” .
Of Friday’s cases reported by the Korea Agency for Disease Prevention and Control, 928 were locally transmitted and 22 were imported, bringing the total to 41,736 infections with 578 deaths.
More than 70 percent of the nationwide transmission cases occurred in Seoul and its neighboring areas, where roughly half of the country’s 52 million people live, amid the latest spread through small and widespread groups.
READ: South Korea mobilizes military in Seoul as COVID-19 cases rise, deaths rise
READ: South Korea to buy millions of doses of vaccines as COVID-19 cases rise
“This is indeed an emergency situation,” President Moon Jae-in said, ordering the mobilization of police, military personnel and public doctors in an effort to stem the further spread of the coronavirus.
“We plan to widely expand walk-by-pass coronavirus testing methods … as preventive measures to track infected people and block the spread,” Moon said in a Facebook post.
South Korea is likely to see a further increase in the number of cases with significant increases in testing, he added.
The third wave comes despite stricter social distancing rules that went into effect Tuesday, including unprecedented curfews at restaurants and most other businesses. The country has reported about 600 cases a day this week.
The increase has been a blow to South Korea’s acclaimed pandemic fighting system, which used invasive tracking, testing and quarantine to mitigate previous waves without blocking, keeping daily infections below 50 for much of the summer.
Calling on this wave of crisis, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said on Friday that he would dispatch some 800 military, police and government workers to all districts of greater Seoul to help locate potential patients.
CHECK THIS: Our comprehensive coverage of the COVID-19 outbreak and its developments
Download our app or subscribe to our Telegram channel for the latest updates on the coronavirus outbreak: https://cna.asia/telegram
