South Korea’s Health Ministry Removes Pandemic Dance Video After Backlash, East Asia News & Top Stories



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SEOUL (THE KOREA HERALD / ASIA NEWS NETWORK) – The South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare removed a video it had posted on social media encouraging dancing to overcome the sadness of the coronavirus.

The video, uploaded on New Year’s Day and removed on Saturday (January 2), drew criticism for not being in contact with people, as the majority of South Korea’s population lives in apartments.

The ministry apologized in a statement on Facebook, saying that the video, which promotes dancing as a way to cope with the pandemic, did not consider “multiple problems, including noise between floors.”

“We apologize to the public. We have now made the video private,” the ministry said.

The video is no longer available on Facebook or YouTube.

The video shows five members of a family doing housework in an apartment before a television reporter joined them and they started dancing.

Gatherings of five or more people are banned in and around Seoul, and the same rule will take effect across the country on Monday. Families living in the same household are an exception.

The dancers jump in unison at one point as the song says, “Get out, stress. Get out, coronavirus.”

According to recent data from Statistics Korea, nearly six out of 10 homes across the country were apartments last year.

The backlash comes as the government had to defend its late entry into the vaccine race in recent weeks, as critics accused it of celebrating the country’s handling of the pandemic, also known as the K quarantine model, too much. soon.

In July, the United States signed an agreement with Pfizer and BioNTech to purchase 100 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine. Japan also reached an agreement to buy its vaccine for 60 million people in the same month.

In early December, Korea said it had “insured” Covid-19 vaccines for 44 million people, although it had signed an official contract with AstraZeneca alone for 10 million people at the time.

Announcements of a deal with Pfizer, Janssen and Moderna came weeks later.



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