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INCHEON: On the fourth floor of Incheon City Hall, the office of South Korean epidemiological investigator Jang Hanaram is packed with six desks, two folding cots, and a table full of instant noodles, energy drinks and digestive aids.
Jang is one of six employees working 24-hour shifts in the tight space, frantically tracking and contacting potential COVID-19 cases in South Korea’s third-largest city as the country battles its biggest wave of infections to date. moment.
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Jang said he knew this wave was different in early December when bright red messages reporting confirmed cases began to multiply in the chat room on his computer screen.
FILE PHOTO: City employees work at the Incheon City coronavirus response command center in Incheon, South Korea, Dec. 18, 2020. Photo taken Dec. 18, 2020. REUTERS / Heo Ran
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is really getting out of control,'” he told Reuters.
South Korea won international praise earlier this year when it quickly cracked down on the outbreaks by deploying an aggressive, high-tech contact tracing system that extracted location data from cell phones, credit card records, CCTV footage and other information. to track and isolate potential patients.
But after a summer of promoting South Korea’s approach as a model to the world, officials acknowledge that the success of those earlier efforts helped fuel an overconfidence that left them struggling to contain a third wave and struggling to defend one. cautious timeline for vaccines.
In eight interviews with Reuters, front-line fighters in South Korea’s war on the virus described what they say were critical mistakes by the government.
The failures included not investing in enough manpower and training for the search program, not mobilizing private hospitals fast enough to free up more beds, indecisive social distancing policies, and taking a slow approach to securing and deploying vaccines.
To manage its digital tools, South Korea relies on an army of conscripted public health and medical workers like Jang, a recent medical school graduate who works as a contact tracker instead of his mandatory military service.
Jang says that overworked and underpaid recruits or other public health doctors rotate too quickly in and out of their positions, while many of the new recruits have little or no training.
“The feeling of fatigue is very high now,” he said.
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Compared to disasters unfolding in the United States, Europe and other virus hotspots, South Korea’s total of 52,550 cases and the daily high of 1,097 remain low.
But this new wave is more persistent and widespread than any of the previous waves, and has led to an unprecedented rise in deaths, with some patients dying before hospital beds are available. The number of active cases is now more than double the previous peak in March.
“Despite the warnings, overconfidence and excessive optimism had flourished in the minds of many people,” said Lee Jae-myung, governor of Gyeonggi province, the most populous area in the country.
When asked if the government had been overconfident, Yoon Tae-ho, director general of public health policy, acknowledged that there were some areas where the authorities should have responded faster, including the mobilization of various medical resources.
“We deeply regret that we fell a little behind in what we should be one step ahead of the virus,” he said in a briefing on Tuesday. Still, he said authorities were working to fix any problems and was confident that the country could “tackle this third wave if the government, medical teams and the people unite.”
BRAND NEW TRACKING SYSTEM
Unlike previous waves of infections, which were primarily focused on individual events or organizations like churches or nightclubs, the current increase in cases is being driven by smaller groups in places like restaurants and offices, which are harder to track.
And nearly a third of recent cases come from completely unknown origins.
READ: Seoul To Ban Gatherings Of More Than 4 As South Korea Reports Daily Kills From COVID-19
Since the pandemic began, South Korea has more than doubled the number of researchers, from around 130 to 305, according to the Korea Agency for Disease Prevention and Control.
FILE PHOTO: Lim Seung-kwan, head of the Gyeonggi Province COVID-19 Emergency Response Task Force, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Suwon, South Korea, on December 16, 2020. Photo taken on December 16, 2020. REUTERS / Heo Ran
To further complement their ranks, the government has recently mobilized members of the military and police, but it will take time to train more experienced personnel in the long run, Yoon said.
Lim Seung-kwan, head of Gyeonggi Province’s COVID-19 emergency response task force, said it is time to consider abandoning mass tracking in favor of more specific epidemiological surveys that seek to better understand the specific patterns of the spread of the virus. virus while being released to trained physicians. staff to provide patient care.
“It might be better to relocate those who were tasked with testing and tracking,” he said.
Due to the workload, Jang said they have already started to reduce their tracing – for example, they no longer record movements where the patient was only in one place for a few minutes while wearing a mask.
LOST OPPORTUNITIES
Gyeonggi Governor Lee, a member of President Moon Jae-in’s ruling Democratic Party, agrees that the country can no longer rely on case-specific follow-up and has called for more flexible measures such as mass testing of specific areas and the use of less accurate but faster antigens. test kits for preselection.
Overconfidence prompted a gradual approach to social distancing measures, Lee added, arguing that more drastic but temporary measures would have led to less fatigue among the public.
READ: South Korean President Under Fire Over Vaccine Plans As COVID-19 Cases Rise
South Korea has never imposed full blockades, and as recently as November it was handing out coupons to encourage domestic travel and tourism. The prime minister has said that imposing the highest level of social distancing would be a last resort due to economic damage.
Frustrated by what they see as the national government prioritizing the economy over stopping infections, Lee and the leaders of the cities of Seoul and Incheon this week imposed strict meeting limits for the Christmas and New Year holidays.
Ma Sang-hyuk, vice president of the Korean Vaccine Society, told Reuters the sense of complacency also shaped the country’s vaccine policy, with the government seeing low daily cases during the summer as evidence that they did not need to rush.
“The government overlooked the pandemic when daily cases began to stabilize and thought they could endure without the vaccine,” he said.
Annoyed by criticism of his government’s plan to start providing vaccines in February or March, months after other countries were too relaxed, Moon promised Tuesday that a public vaccination program would “not start too late” and his office emphasized that the country would eventually buy enough. doses to cover more than 85% of the population.
Lim said the government should have prepared for worst-case scenarios, but failed to scale up efforts it had made in previous waves, such as quickly securing enough beds in private hospitals.
“We came to believe that everything was going to be okay if we used the masks well and stick with what we had been doing,” he said. “But that belief prevented the authorities from seeing why they were slow to act and if there were lessons to be learned, from both successes and failures.”
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