So I got wrapped up in my Japan trip and I never did talk about the last three months in Korea (it was only 2 months when I started writing, oops).
By now, the coronavirus and Korea’s response to it has become old news around the world, but I think it might still be good to talk about my experience with it. It could be interesting from a historical perspective some day! I’m going to have a unique view, totally missing out on the common US cultural experience of the quarantine and the lockdown.
I first heard of the scary reports coming out of Wuhan a week or two before my trip. This was around the time the city went into lockdown. Now, you know that reports of some terrible new disease in China are a dime a dozen, and most of them don’t ever amount to anything. But Wuhan was new – I’d never seen an entire city locked down before, and there were really interesting stories and blog posts coming out of people trapped in the city. You heard about people being welded into their apartments, about the CCP building entirely new hospitals in two weeks, about young, healthy doctors dying from the disease…I knew it was something to keep an eye on as I travelled.
In Japan, things weren’t bad. Lots of people were in masks, I noticed. Now, mask-wearing is pretty common in Asia – I found it strange at first but after months of living here it was totally normal to me. The air pollution, especially blowing across the Yellow Sea from China, is pretty bad most days, to the point that I have an app on my phone alerting me when it’s unsafe to go outside. Masks help fight that, so they’re almost a fashion accessory here. Thank God for the Clean Air Act, is all I can say. But masks, while not unheard of, were never especially common – I’d guess that between 1/10 to 1/5 people wore them. In Japan, it was closer to 1/3 to 1/2, which confused me for a while because the air in Japan was so much cleaner. I didn’t realize until a few days in that it was the virus.
But it was still mostly confined to China, with only a handful of cases outside that country. Tourist attractions were all still open (thank goodness), planes were still flying (thank goodness), there was no panic. I left Tokyo less than two days before Diamond Princess docked in Yokohama (near battleship Mikasa!) and was immediately quarantined. In Seoul, there were infrared cameras at the airport measuring our temperature, and we were required to self-report any symptoms to customs agents.
Even in Seoul, though, there was no concern yet. New arrivals were all screened, especially those from China, but everything was open and public gatherings were commonplace. I spent Saturday morning in Seoul, walking through the heart of the city to one of the ancient palaces. Down the main thoroughfare, there was a massive rally in support of “Donal Trump” and the United States, as the political opposition accused President Moon Jae-In of cozying up to North Korea and betraying Korea’s special relationship with the USA. The palace was overrun with tourists, too, and generally life was normal in the capital.
I stayed home Monday to watch the Super Bowl, and for the next two weeks my time was split between planning for the upcoming semester, due to start February 28, and watching Super Bowl highlights, analysis, and reaction. Through this time, Korea had barely 30 new cases, although anyone who travelled outside the country was now subject to a (self-enforced) two-week home quarantine when they returned.
It was February 17 that everything changed. The 31st patient with corona, a woman who had contact with someone newly arrived from Wuhan, I believe, traveled from Seoul to the southeastern city of Daegu. Daegu is a large city of 2.5 million people, the 4th largest in Korea. It served as temporary capital during the war and was (just barely) successfully defended from the North’s invasion. It’s a favorite destination of many English teachers who live in the surrounding countryside. Patient 31, as she became known, left Seoul, was involved in a minor car accident early in February, and checked herself into the hospital. While there, she developed flu-like symptoms, but her flu test came back negative. It was at this time that she went to church – twice. But not a little Catholic church like St. Mary’s.
Korea’s fastest growing religion is Christianity, in all forms. I have Mormon missionary friends, of course, but you have dozens of Protestant congregations growing quickly as well. There are tons of off-shoots and weird little sub-cults (ask me about the church of God the Mother sometime…) as different kinds of Christianity spread all over the peninsula like kudzu. This woman belonged to one such new church. She went to Shincheonji Church of Jesus, massive superchurch with more than 1,000 congregants, all of whom were now exposed.
From Daegu, things exploded, as the congregants had scattered all over. The number of cases exploded from barely 30 to thousands over just a few days. Korea looked like it was going to slide into a nationwide pandemic, with the attendant death and suffering involved. It’s here, though, that the government really stepped up.
First, the new school year was due to start on February 24th for us (28th for most everyone else, I think). We’d have hundreds of students coming from all over the country to stay in our dorms and work in our small classrooms. Well, right away that was delayed for two weeks. Korea took the unprecedented step of cancelling the start of the school year nationwide for two weeks – and I’ve written before about how zealously Koreans view education. This should have been a huge warning bell to everyone watching, including in the USA, that this was serious. Church gatherings, sports leagues like KBO, concerts, and other public events quickly followed.
Second, mask-wearing became universal almost overnight. You couldn’t go into a bar or a restaurant without a mask – hell, you could barely go out in public without one. People queued by the hundreds to buy masks from any available outlet. The government quickly instituted a rationing system, based on your birthday – those whose birthdays fell on a day ending in 0 or 1 bought on Monday, 2 or 3 on Tuesday, etc. You couldn’t get a mask without an ID verifying your birthdate. Now, masks don’t do much to protect you individually, not unless they’re airtight. But if everyone is wearing one, then asymptomatic transmission becomes much, much more difficult. I resisted, at first, because I believed then (and still do) that a mask would do little to prevent the spread, but after a scolding from my principal I came to accept it, if nothing else to reassure my neighbors, and spent most of March and April masked up any time I went outside.
Third, social distancing was a thing in Korea much more quickly than in the United States, and in many ways the nation was prepared for it. Food delivery was already ubiquitous in Korea – delivery drivers zipping around on mopeds is so common that I didn’t even think to mention it until now. Now it just became even more common. People didn’t go to bars or restaurants as often; if you did, you were only allowed in with a mask, and if you were allowed in, you had your temperature checked first. With most people masked up and distanced (although not locked into their apartments – I continued to see and hang out with friends, a bit), with new arrivals now being universally quarantined, most asymptomatic transmission was immediately cut down.
That just left the Daegu cluster, and the government’s most important step, I think: Universal testing and contact tracing. I think this was the USA’s biggest screw up, and given the lead time the US had to prepare, this is pretty inexcusible.
Korea immediately made cheap, plentiful, coronavirus testing kits. Overnight drive-through test centers sprang up all around the country. I walked by several daily on my way to and from work. You could go into a little tent, have a blood sample taken, and know your results within a few hours. This was either free at the point of use or incredibly cheap, like 20,000 won. So most people who had it knew very, very quickly.
Meanwhile, the government dedicated huge amount of resources to running down those with the virus, starting with the Daegu supercluster. For weeks, anyone who had been to the church was contacted by the authorities, and their movements traced. Anyone they had come in contact with was also traced. People who tested negative were told to self-quarantine and otherwise let go. Those testing positive were universally quarantined, hospitalized if necessary, and their contacts traced. It took weeks to catch up, and Korea’s numbers skyrocketed from 30 to 10,000 over the next 6 weeks, but after peaking on February 29 at 909 new cases, the new daily infections gradually started to slow, then level off, then dropped to a trickle. Yesterday, there were 0 new domestic cases for the first time since early February. 4 new cases arrived from overseas, and that’s all.
In the meantime, the rest of the world kind of forgot about Korea, as Iran, then Italy, then the USA itself fell victim one by one to the disease. The USA should have locked down far sooner than it did, with the voluntary social distancing and isolation that Korea did in the weeks before the Daegu outbreak. Mask-wearing should have become more widespread sooner – I assume cultural reasons are why it took so long to start in the first place – and the continued lack of testing and contact tracing is, as I said, inexcusable.
But life here has been sort of normal the last 2 months since things exploded in late February. I wear a mask to go out and when I ride the bus, I get my temperature taken when I eat in a restaurant, my school has a thermal camera measuring my temperature when I walk in in the morning. School was delayed two weeks, then two more weeks, then two weeks again, but finally early in April we started teaching online via zoom, so I’ve been scrambling to learn how to do that and to adapt my curriculum. Gradually places like the public parks and hiking trails have filled up again, and my friends and I meet regularly on weekends to celebrate birthdays or just enjoy each other’s company.
As a sign of how the Korean people feel, the day I was in Seoul, there were rallies and protests against President Moon, and his approval rating was underwater. On April 15, Korea had legislative elections – even in the midst of the pandemic. You had to wear a mask to vote, you were issued disposable gloves, and you had to stand at least 6 feet apart from everyone in the queues. But they had the elections nevertheless, and President Moon’s party won a landslide victory. Koreans have compared their governments’ response with the rest of the world’s, and been pretty satisfied. Understandably so – Korea more or less beat this thing, straight up. Korea has had less than 250 deaths, out of a population of more than 50 million. It should be viewed as a case study for decades to come on how to combat a pandemic. So now Koreans are full of patriotic pride, and are starting to, I think, get over a little bit of the historic inferiority complex they’ve had regarding the West. This was the front page of the country’s English language newspaper earlier this week:
Note Asia lighting the way forward.
Life here is getting back to fully normal. With 0 new domestic cases, and total cases in the country dropping towards zero, there’s talk of reopening everything. KBO has restarted its preseason, and will start playing live games (without spectators) soon. Schools are projected to re-open possibly as early as next week, and the government has put together detailed plans for what reopening will look like and safety measures in place to prevent renewed outbreaks. The streets and public transport are busy again, and I have gone out the last few days into the spring air without a mask (although probably more than 50% of people are still wearing them).
School keeps me busy, though. Rewriting my lessons to be taught online, actually teaching them, and grading the resulting work occupies most of my spare time during the week. On the weekends, I try to maximize my time with my friends here, since I know the time is soon coming when I shall return home, and I will probably never see most of them again. I read the news from the US, and I shake my head, but thankfully everyone in our family is safe and healthy.
So, that’s my view of the corona pandemic from Korea. I didn’t have very many adventures, but that’s just a reflection of the competence of the government. No desperation, no near death experiences, hardly even a ripple in my daily routine. I lived in uninteresting times here. And that’s all that you can ask, I think.
May we all someday live in uninteresting times.
Gwangju Dreaming 