Author: GIKorea

The Korea Herald has a good in-depth look at what happened with the ROK Navy ship that had most of its crew become infected with the coronavirus:

A seaman first exhibited cold-like symptoms on July 2, a day after the destroyer had made a four-day supply stop at a port. But he was treated with cold medicine and not tested for COVID-19, even though many others began to show similar symptoms. The medical staff had allegedly overlooked COVID-19 symptoms.

What made the outbreak more lethal was the wrong COVID-19 self-test kits Cheonghae packed upon leaving Korea. The unit left with antibody test kits, which take much longer time to detect infection than antigen test kits. It was just plain mistake, the Navy admitted.

“It was days later when we brought in local medical specialists to administer the industry-standard PCR tests,” one Cheonghae officer said, adding his unit began to enforce strict quarantine procedures after the test, which found the first six COVID-19 patients.

That was the first case of infection, which Cheonghae confirmed on July 15, and three days later, the military flew aircraft to airlift the entire crew back home. Many service members who had tested negative for COVID-19 using self-test kits were believed to have been infected.

“We just dropped the ball there,” a military official said.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link, but there is a clearly a cover up going on within the ship because they are trying to blame contaminated food for infecting the ship. Passing of the coronavirus from surface contact or eating food has been found to be highly unlikely. The vast majority of people are infected by airborne contact with the virus. The crew is claiming they were not in contact with anyone during their 4-day port call in Oman which appears to be unlikely.

“It’s highly unlikely that it came from food. I suspect there may have been people-to-people contact, though the seamen deny there was,” he said, adding the crew should be honest with whom they had come into contact.

The Joong Ang Ilbo has a report about what happened to the Korean climber who went missing in the Karakoram Range:

A Russian who tried to rescue stranded Korean mountaineer Kim Hong-bin said at least 15 climbers passed by Kim without offering any help.  
   
Kim, the first Korean mountaineer with a physical impairment to climb all 14 peaks of the Himalayan and Karakoram mountains more than 8,000 meters (26,250 feet) above sea level, fell down a crevasse while trying to descend the 14th, Broad Peak on the border of Pakistan and China, on July 18.  
   
Russian mountaineer Vitaly Lazo reported on Risk.ru, a website with posts from mountaineers, that he and fellow rescuers received a report that same night that a Russian climber named Anastasia Runova had fallen through a crevasse on Broad Peak and needed help. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but according to the report if someone would have stopped to help the exhausted porter trying to rescue Kim Hong-bin, he may have been saved. Instead his body will probably forever be lost on that mountain.

The North Koreans have been much quieter then I was expecting them to be this summer. This leads me to believe there must be a lot of back channel communication happening that we don’t know about:

South and North Korea have restored their communication lines, Cheong Wa Dae said Tuesday, with leaders of the two countries agreeing to rebuild mutual trust for better inter-Korean relations. 

This latest development has raised hopes for another reconciliatory mood on the Korean Peninsula and a resumption of the stalled nuclear talks between the United States and North Korea. 

“South and North Korea have agreed to restore their communication lines, which had been severed, as of 10 a.m., Tuesday,” presidential senior secretary for public communication Park Soo-hyun said during a press conference.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

This case takes another tragic turn:

A suspect in the suicide death of an Air Force sexual abuse victim has been found dead at a military detention facility, a human rights group said Monday.

The senior master sergeant was indicted on charges of inflicting secondary harm and threatening retaliation against the master sergeant, surnamed Lee, who took her own life in May, three months after she was allegedly groped and suffered other abuse by a colleague of the same rank.

“The senior master sergeant was found unconscious at 2:55 p.m. Sunday and transferred to a civilian hospital but later died,” the Center for Military Human Rights Korea, a nongovernmental organization, said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

For anyone complaining about USFK COVID restrictions just be happy you are not in the ROK Military:

The defense ministry extended the toughest social distancing rules for the military for another two weeks Monday to curb a new wave of the pandemic, restricting service members’ vacations and off-installation activities.

The Level 4 scheme, which was supposed to expire Sunday, will be in place until Aug. 8, in line with the government’s COVID-19 guidance, according to the ministry.

Under the new measures, only 10 percent of members of a unit are allowed to go on vacation at the same time. Off-duty travels, staying out overnight and meetings with visitors are banned in principle.

The ministry also ordered military units to cancel or postpone all private meetings, prohibit nonessential events and travel, and conduct religious services online.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It looks like someone at MBC is going to get in trouble for having a sense of humor:

MBC went too far during its coverage of the Tokyo Olympic opening ceremony on Thursday, so much so that the broadcaster found it extremely challenging to make up for the mistakes.

Its hours-long livestream of the ceremony was filled with factual errors including nonsensical, scathing and discriminatory descriptions of some countries which sparked a furious online backlash. 

When Chilean athletes marched during the opening ceremony, MBC used the image of the Routes of Santiago de Composte, a network of four Christian pilgrimage routes in northern Spain. MBC staff seemed to have confused the Chilean capital Santiago with the Spanish pilgrimage routes of the same name. It also used an image of the Atlantic Ocean, instead of the Pacific, for Micronesia, a tiny country consisting of 2,100 islands in the Western Pacific Ocean. 

MBC left its viewers speechless with its inappropriate images for several countries. It used salmon for Norway and pizza for Italy. When the athletes of Republic of the Marshall Islands marched, the TV caption told viewers, “It was a nuclear test site for the United States.” 

Some of the graphics used were insulting. For instance, the image of Bitcoin was used for El Salvador as if the TV station was trying to remind viewers of the Central American country’s adoption of the virtual currency as its official tender. An image of riots was used to represent Haiti.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.