Here's a screenshot of the Johns Hopkins dashboard taken on February 28:
South Korea then ranked 8th in case counts, with 3.273 million cases and 1,303 deaths. But 2.228 million cases had been recorded in the preceding 28 days. Something was already going wrong in a country that had done a pretty good job through 2020 and 2021.
And here's a screenshot taken this evening, after the March 31 case counts had been posted by the KDCA:
South Korea now ranks first in the world with 13,375,518 cases, of which 16,505 resulted in death. So an advanced, prosperous nation of 52 million has seen 10,102,069 of its citizens fall ill in 31 days. As well, 15,202 of them died in the same 31 days.
And this was the result of deliberate policy, as pointed out in a devastating article in The Korea Herald today. An excerpt:
The rationale for the omicron plan is that the intensive social distancing of the delta days is “no longer viable nor cost-efficient,” according to the Health Ministry spokesperson on March 2. And as omicron is milder, doing so would pose little threat to the population.
Similarly, Jeong Eun-kyeong, commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said at a March 21 briefing that “as there already has been substantial exposure in the community due to omicron’s high transmissibility, controlling the outbreak with social distancing alone will have significant limits.”
But the focus on social distancing eclipses what health officials should do without having to ask people to stay home and relive the intense isolation of the early pandemic days, according to public health professor Dr. Oh Ju-hwan of Seoul National University.
By using social distancing as a “blanket term” for pandemic control measures, health officials sold people on the idea that we no longer had to sacrifice freedoms to contain the virus, he said. “The narrative that social distancing is the only approach is misleading, and it’s been used as an excuse for authorities to do less of what they ought to be doing.”
With omicron’s rise, first to be abandoned were measures that exact the most administrative burdens, like extensive contact tracing and testing that Korea had prided itself on, he said. While quick to remove the no-cost testing-for-all policy and contact tracing, health officials kept social distancing restrictions, though eased, for the public. The cap on the size of personal gatherings and nighttime curfews for stores are still in effect, though they are anticipated to be removed soon.
Google mobility trends shows movements have been on a decline in Korea after omicron took over as the dominant virus in late January. Visits to retail and recreation facilities especially have fallen considerably compared to when the delta variant was raging across the country in the fall of 2021.
“When cases soar and hospitals fill up, people exercise caution voluntarily,” Oh said. “The mobility trends data demonstrates that the surge we’re seeing now is not in fact attributable to the lack of social distancing, as some officials and experts suggest.”
Although health officials like to emphasize the pains of social distancing, and how they are no longer sustainable, what was glaringly absent were efforts to test and trace cases and grasp the true scale of the outbreak, he said.
Active tracing was also crucial to “monitor variants, as letting the virus run amok in the community gives it more opportunities to evolve,” he said.
This policy seems to be what most governments are adopting now, including the US and Canada. I think we are going to see case counts on a Korean scale well before summer—and like South Korea, the true numbers will be even higher, because we won't be testing or contact tracing either.
Nor will we consider that 10 to 20 percent of these COVID-19 cases will evolve into long COVID, with consequences for millions of people who are now celebrating the end of "restrictions" like mask mandates.
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