4 days ago
Yonhap News Agency
The country broke the unwelcome record of 30 million three years and three days after it reported its first confirmed case on Jan. 20, 2020. Given the population gap of about six times with the U.S., Korea is still seeing more daily infections than even the U.S., where health officials "seem to have given up on new cases," as some Korean experts put it. Besides their failures to close the border on Chinese arrivals right after its outbreak, health officials effectively controlled COVID-19 with their "3-T strategy" of testing, tracing and treating. With the near-complete lifting of the mask mandate, health officials and the media say now is the time for "self-quarantine," stressing personal hygiene. During the pandemic's peak two years ago, the so-called Big Five hospitals could not accept COVID-19 patients with underlying diseases for fear of infecting other patients.
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