Spike in South Korea COVID-19 Continues As it Now Has 556 Cases & 4 Deaths


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Everyone’s now looking at South Korea nowadays, and it’s not for the reason that South Koreans are proud of.

Other than closing down a Samsung factory for about two days due to a confirmed case in the conglomerate, South Korea now has the highest number of COVID-19 cases after China.

And it’s not a gradual rise but a hockey-stick rise: majority of the new cases comes in the last four days, and it’s all due to church that’s often being accused of being a cult.

Yesterday night, there were 433 cases.

This morning?

556.

Spike in South Korea COVID-19 Continues As it Now Has 556 Cases & 4 Deaths

This morning, South Korea reported 123 more COVID-19 cases.

Unlike Singapore whereby the confirmed cases were scattered all over the island, South Korea’s cases involved three “mass infections”.

And as expected, there’s a growth in the mass infection clusters.

One of the more well-known clusters is the Shincheonji Church cluster in Daegu caused by a 61-year-old woman who’s now commonly known as Patient 31. The woman had refused to be tested for COVID-19 and even went for four services in the church (or cult, whatever you want to call it since virus doesn’t care). So far, that has led to 231 infections—almost half of all the total cases.

Image: The New York Times

There are still over 1,000 followers of the Church with symptoms, so we might be seeing more cases later today.

Yes, it’s so bad that South Korea reports the number of new cases twice a day.

The other cluster involved the mental ward of Cheongdo Daenam Hospital. Apparently it stemmed from a funeral held in a hall of the hospital, and it’s loosely related to the Shincheonji Church as well, as the funeral was for the Shincheonji  founder’s brother.

However, the information pertaining to the hospital is still pretty hazy: the infections could have occurred due to a “repeated exposure given the isolated facility of the psychiatric wards, where many patients share the same room.” The President of South Korea has called for officials to investigate potential links between Shincheonji and the hospital.

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There is another cluster that has 17 infections, but that has nothing to do with Shincheonji, as it’s located in another region, Gyeongbuk.

This morning, two more deaths were also announced, bringing the total death toll in the country to 4.


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And in case you didn’t already know, people in Daegu have started panic buying daily essentials for a good reason: the entire city looks like a ghost town now.