Then you have vaccination as the very strong second line of defense, that really significantly reduces hospitalizations and deaths. And it still kind of works in Korea, as opposed to other countries. So if you combine that, if you think of this as a layered defense, the first layers distance and hygiene, that’s masks and hand-washing and things. That meant that as Omicron took off, even though the number of people who had been infected in Korea was minuscule at that point, people were protected against the most important thing, which is hospitalization and death.
So that as Omicron started in Korea, which is January, you know, 95% of the eligible population had a full course of vaccination and probably on the order of 80 to 85% of people who were eligible were boosted. So what they did to prepare for that, which is actually probably the most important thing in a pandemic response preparation, is that they ensured that as much of the population that was eligible for vaccination would be vaccinated and that a majority of people would again be boosted. When they hit a certain number of infections per day, that kind of intensive follow up became nearly impossible. As Sangmi had noted, when the government made the decision to start loosening the controls and to stop tracking and tracing as intensively as they had before, they did that, essentially, for practical reasons. KIM: So the government has taken a very incremental approach to releasing the controls that were put into place. Jerome Kim, welcome to you.ĬHAKRABARTI: So first of all, can you tell us a little bit more about what changes regarding COVID restrictions the government in South Korea might make? As Sangmi Cha said, that might happen on Friday. He's director general of the International Vaccine Institute. She's Seoul bureau reporter for Bloomberg News with us from Seoul. And we're looking at what lessons the United States can learn from South Korea's example. MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: South Korea … has been on a completely different trajectory during the entire course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gihyun Yang, rising senior at Boston University who’s been in Korea since April 2020. Adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Public Health at Yonsei University. ( Kim, director general of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI). Sangmi Cha, Seoul Bureau reporter for Bloomberg. Today, On Point: The pandemic's trajectory in South Korea has been completely different from what the U.S. In fact, even as Korea’s COVID case counts are a hundred times higher now than in January, but the country’s fatality rate has gone down. "And they are focusing solely on minimizing the mortality rate and the rate of people getting severely ill, especially among the elderly and those vulnerable groups who have underlying conditions.” "For some time now, they have shifted that strategy," she adds.
" beginning of the pandemic, Korea was very focused on the mitigation strategy - on clamping down each and every case - just like China or Hong Kong right now, pretty much close to the zero-COVID policy," Sangmi Cha, Seoul Bureau reporter for Bloomberg, says. Well, in South Korea, they’ve done exactly that.
(Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)Ĭan a country ease its COVID restrictions as new cases are exploding? People walk along the Namdaemun market on Main Seoul, South Korea.