6/25 – 6/27: Quarantine
Sitting here in my hotel overlooking Incheon airport (and the narrow strait to Seoul beyond), counting the airplanes taking off, on day 3 of quarantine. This, despite three negative COVID tests, a fourth upon my arrival, after riding on 3 different planes masked up and sanitized with OTHER people who had multiple negative tests, and vaccinated. The cost (to me)/benefit (to Korea) is one of the most absurd destroyers of value I’ve ever seen in my life (but Kajal is worth it so I will try to minimize my complaints).
Anyway, Korea cares little about costing foreigners thousands in return for reducing by the tiniest of chances the possibility of bringing in a single extra COVID case into the country (which has 600 cases daily), so I thought I’d update my previous post about Korea in the time of corona and talk about the quarantine process.
I’ve been through Incheon customs 3 times now, so I know the terminal well enough. However, I never reached customs upon debarking – once clear of the jetway, the flood of people (99% Koreans and then my stupid ass) ground quickly to a halt, and I waited in yet another line. This line ground slowly forward for everyone entering the country, as we passed yet another checkpoint. Here, my temperature was taken and my COVID test examined – yes, the same test examined in San Francisco and in Vancouver. This process shouldn’t have taken very long, but I was in the line for perhaps 45 minutes. Eventually, I was waved through once they were satisfied that I (apparently) wasn’t actively spewing coronavirus into the air or something.
From there, I passed to a second health screening, splitting off from the Korean passport holders. The line was really short at this point! I shuffled up to another desk, where a man with a fairly solid grasp of English took all my documents, again, plus the extra ones I’d been given at the last checkpoint 200 yards away. Once again, he pored over them, as well as my Korean address and a contact number to reach me at. The company I (thought I) was contracting with for my quarantine didn’t answer the phone, so instead he took Kajal’s number, since I’d be staying with her in the country. Calling her on my phone, he grilled her. Did she know who I was? Who was she? What was the nature of our relationship? Eventually, he was satisfied that I wouldn’t be a corona-spreading homeless vagrant, and waved me on to the next checkpoint.
This was passport control, at last. I wound through the queue, pretty much alone, and up to the gate, where the customs officers sat in plastic isolation booths. Her eyebrows raised that I came to the country with no long-term visa – what kind of idiot was traveling on a tourist visa at this time? – but she accepted it. She tried to get me to sign a document agreeing to the expensive government quarantine, but I thought I had arranged that with a private company, which advertised cheaper quarantine services. After some discussion, she allowed me to skip that part. I was passed to another holding area, and sat for about 20 minutes until a quarantine officer came to grab me.
I was brought into an office and sat behind a desk, where my photo was taken a few times, my fingerprints taken, and all my documents that I’d accumulated at the three previous checkpoints (plus all the various waypoints on the long road from St. Louis to Incheon before that) were examined once more.
I don’t want to go into details, but the main point of discussion was my quarantine. It was apparently, impossible for me to quarantine anywhere other than at the government facility, since all other facilities were NOT contracting with the government as I thought, but only available to those with longterm visas. Since I was only going to be in the country 8 weeks, I would be required to stay at the Incheon Hyatt. There was a lot of confusion and protests on my part, but I couldn’t get a hold of Enkor, and the officer pressed me to sign the papers, which I eventually felt I had no choice in.
From there, I was taken out of the area and dumped into the more familiar terminal. My excellent luck with baggage claim continued as my bags rolled off the line just as I arrived (more than 2 hours after landing at this point), and I wrestled them (I brought too many books…) into yet another pen in the main terminal, this one with other foreigners, waiting to be herded along. I was given a red badge of shame, indicating my ultimate destiny in government quarantine, and eventually I was driven with the others to a tour bus just outside the airport (I passed through the same sitting area where I spent my first 6 hours in Korea, two years before, waiting for the EPIK desk to open, before corona, before all my adventures since then), and driven a short mile or so to the Hyatt.
Here we were greeted with a huge flotilla of health workers in full isolation suits (note that anyone who had made it this far has multiple negative tests within the last 3 days), and in the lobby I was taken to some plastic folding tables and filled out more forms for quarantine – a health check, contact data, etc. Everyone, I should note, was at this point very kind. The worker who helped me was a cheerful, chatty young woman with decent English – when I hesitated between Asian and Western food on my quarantine sheet, she pressed me to make a choice, then smiled in approval when I circled Asian. “It’s better, trust me,” she said. The man next to me was from Jordan and spoke hardly any Korean or English (and couldn’t read either alphabet), while I of course speak absolutely no Arabic beyond ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ (and the Shahadah, but neither seemed useful here). I helped him as best I could, to install a quarantine app on our phones – an app to check our own health each day and report any symptoms of covid that might have made it through the formidable phalanx of defenses thus far. I would also note that the gate in Vancouver and Incheon airport had both confirmed that I had installed two other, separate quarantine apps, which the staff here promptly dismissed as out of date and no longer being used.
We landed at 4. By now, the shadows were long in the lobby and it was rapidly nearing 8 pm. Two by two, each folding table was called up to the front of the lobby to meet more isolation-suited workers, and I of course was in the back of the place. Eventually, though, the Jordanian man and me were called up. The older gentleman behind the table, a doctor with a brusque air of competence and authority about him, efficiently briefed me on quarantine procedures (trash here, mealtimes at these times, don’t go outside, etc, etc,), and then gave me a box of health supplies and sent me to the back of the lobby for another PCR test. After getting one more q-tip shoved up my nose, at last I was free to gather my belongings and lug htem up to the elevator, up to the 10th floor, and into the room in which I have spent the last 3 days.
It’s not a bad room, but again, I find the whole system to be of seriously dubious benefit. In return for a miniscule reduction in the risk of extra COVID cases coming into a country where the virus is already loose, where there are already myriad internal barriers to its spread (no gatherings larger than 5 permitted, masks, temperature checks between cities, when entering public facilities, etc, etc), the country is throwing hundreds of people who have already tested negative and have only ever been exposed to other people with negative tests into a full two-weeks of isolation, just in case one of us was somehow asymptomatic for that entire time so as to prevent us from entering the country…and joining the other 150,000 people with covid in the country, all at the cost of thousands per person in room and board. Again, it’s costs largely imposed on foreigners, so the ROK government doesn’t give a damn, but it’s also costing Korea in terms of tourism, in lost business, and in the massive amounts of manpower they’re spending. The government obviously thinks it’s worth it – I obviously disagree.
Oh well. May as well enjoy my vacation while I’ve got it. At least it’ll be a story to tell someday.
Gwangju Dreaming 