South Korea brings back social distancing measures after coronavirus surge

South Korea on Thursday was forced to beef up its social distancing measures again after the highest spike in coronavirus case in almost two months and warnings from health officials that the surge risked erasing some of the country's hard-won gains against the pandemic.

The announcement came as the Korea Centres for Disease Control (KCDC) reported 79 new cases of Covid-19, with 69 of them linked to a distribution facility owned by Coupang, the country’s leading e-commerce giant, located in Bucheon, west of the capital, Seoul.

The tally is feared to increase as thousands of workers and their contacts are tested for the virus, and health officials have cautioned that the country’s much-lauded contact-tracing scheme is being increasingly stretched by new clusters.

Following an emergency government meeting, public facilities in Seoul such as parks, museums and art galleries will be closed for the next two weeks. Companies have been urged to adopt more flexible working practices and the staged reopening of schools is now under threat.

"If we fail to eradicate the spread of the virus in the metropolitan area at an early stage, it will lead to more community infections, eventually undermining school reopenings," Park Neung-hoo, the health minister, said in a press briefing reported by Yonhap.

South Korea has never adopted the draconian lockdowns seen in China, but it did enforce a strict social distancing campaign that was enforced between March 22 and May 5.

On May 6, it introduced a scheme called "everyday life quarantine" which gave public facilities and business establishments the leeway to reopen on condition of following basic sanitation measures.

However, the country faced a serious setback earlier this month after a cluster that emerged in the capital’s Itaewon nightclub district triggered a new round of infections. To date, 261 new cases have been linked to Itaewon clubs and bars.

Entertainment venues in Seoul have been strongly advised to close down over the next two weeks.

Jeong Eun-kyeong, the KCDC director, said the country may need to step up its restrictions again as it had become increasingly difficult for health workers to track transmissions amid increasing public activity.

“We will do our best to trace contacts and implement preventive measures, but there’s a limit to such efforts,” she said. “There’s a need to maximise social distancing in areas where the virus is circulating, to force people to avoid public facilities and other crowded spaces.”

The new clusters of infections have made schools jittery and hundreds have chosen not to reopen.  All 251 schools in Bucheon have been closed and the authorities in Incheon, another city bordering the capital, have also suspended the reopening of 243 schools.

Nationwide, 838, or 4 per cent of the total 20,902 schools, have not yet welcomed students back.