Category: Korea-General Topics

It looks like there will be fewer Koreans studying in the United States this Fall:

International students in the United States on student visas cannot attend a university this fall if their studies are entirely online, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Monday.

In a statement, ICE announced that students on non-immigrant F-1 and M-1 visas who attend universities that operate entirely online amid the COVID-19 pandemic “may not take a full online course load and remain in the United States.”

“The U.S. Department of State will not issue visas to students enrolled in schools and/or programs that are fully online for the fall semester, nor will the U.S. Customs and Border Protection permit these students to enter the United States,” ICE said.

The agency added that F-1 students who attend schools that provide a mixture of online and in-person classes will be permitted to take some online courses.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but the loss of these students coming to the U.S. will be a blow to the universities and local communities. This is because they will lose money from them staying in the dorms and spending money living in the community. Additionally I would not be surprised if many of these students just drop out since they can’t travel to the U.S. to attend thus the schools will lose the tuition money as well.

Here is what is likely coming to U.S. schools this Fall:

But classrooms looked nothing like before.  
   
Students now start their days by filling out an online self-diagnosis form before they go to school, which asks them if they are displaying any symptoms of the disease and whether they have visited any Covid-19 hot spots. A single tick of any box means they can’t go to school and must stay quarantined at home.  
   
In many cities, students go to school on staggered schedules to minimize physical contact near the front gates, and have their temperatures checked by a thermal imaging camera to screen anyone who records 37.5 degrees Celsius (99.5 Fahrenheit) or higher.  
   
Masks should be worn at all times except during lunch, and desks that used to be placed in pairs are now spaced out. Study rooms have been shut and libraries now have the sole purpose of lending books.  
   
During lunchtime, students are prohibited from chatting and are either separated by plexiglass dividers or have to sit separated far from each other. 

When a student tests positive or a cluster of infections arise, the school in question as well as schools nearby close their doors again for a couple of days and resort back to e-learning.  
   
While high schools in the Seoul metropolitan area are required to run classrooms at two-thirds of their capacity, kindergartens through middle schools are required to run at one-third, which means more than half of the student body is at home on any given day, engaging in remote learning.  
   
The vast majority of students outside the Seoul metropolitan area go to school every day. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Not a good look for USFK:

 Dozens of foreigners presumed to be American citizens or soldiers created disturbances by setting off firecrackers at a renowned beach in Busan on Saturday night apparently in celebration of Independence Day in the United States, resulting in the brief detention of a soldier, police said Monday.

The foreigners shot numerous rounds of firecrackers into the sky and even towards citizens for two hours, beginning around 7 p.m., on and around Haeundae Beach in the southern port city in an apparent Fourth of July party, according to the Busan Metropolitan Police Agency.

Police received more than 70 reports of complaints from Busan citizens concerned about wild and dangerous acts by foreign people not wearing face masks particularly amid the ongoing social distancing campaign to stem the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

The foreigners, whom the police presumed to be American soldiers on vacation to celebrate the Fourth of July, were accused of shooting firecrackers towards citizens, as well as at nearby buildings, and mocking the police.

Indeed, six patrol cars and one team of police officers came to the scene of disturbances and attempted to disperse the foreigners, but some of them continued to set off firecrackers. In the process, one U.S. soldier in his 20s was briefly detained while fleeing after shooting firecrackers at citizens.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It appears the Korean left will deal with the comfort women scandal by attempting to erase any memory of it instead of holding those accountable for allowing the fraud to happen:

A shelter for surviving victims of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery is set to be closed after the last resident recently left the facility, the operator said Saturday.

Gil Won-ok, 92, left the shelter June 11 to stay at a church operated by her 61-year-old stepson, priest Hwang Sun-hee, according to the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance (Korea Council), the nongovernmental organization working for South Korea’s “comfort women,” that is currently mired in an alleged embezzlement scandal

The Korea Council said it has yet to decide when to close the shelter in Mapo District, western Seoul, and return it to the Myungsung Church, which owns the property.

The planned shutdown comes as the head of the shelter was found dead at her apartment in Paju, north of Seoul, early last month. 

Korea Times via a reader tip

You can read more at the link.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out because in the U.S. universities did not give discounted or refunded tuition to students that were forced into online learning either:

South Korean university students have joined together to file a class action lawsuit against the Ministry of Education and schools, seeking partial tuition refunds for disruptions to learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Movement for Tuition Refunds, a student group formed by the National University Student Council, held a press briefing on Wednesday in front of the Seoul Central District Court to call on universities to refund part of their spring tuition.

Some 3,500 students from 42 universities nationwide have participated in the class action lawsuit, according to the group.

The global crisis caused by the novel coronavirus has created a major disruption in the way the country’s higher education institutions offer classes. As schools shut down and classes are being offered remotely, there have been continuing complaints from students that they are not getting what they paid for.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

It seems inevitable that the coronavirus is going to infect kids at school and I am surprised it has taken this long for it to happen:

Three infection cases of school kids in Daejeon have sent officials and educators to scurry for measures to curb transmission among young children Wednesday, as they might be the country’s first school transmissions.

Three fifth-graders at Cheondong Elementary School in Daejeon, about 160 kilometers south of Seoul, were confirmed to have tested positive for the new coronavirus, according to city officials.

One is a classmate of the school’s first patient, who was confirmed to have contracted COVID-19 on Monday. The two students took classes at the same cram school, but their schedules were found not to have overlapped.

Another student was found to have come into contact with the first patient at a gymnasium. The two students are known to be quite close to each other, visiting each other’s houses frequently.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but the infection may have happened outside of the school as well. Bottomline though is that schools just need to have a plan in place in how to deal with infections when they happen because they will.

There should be more of this antibody testing done in the U.S. as well to get a better idea of how wide spread the coronavirus actually is:

The South Korean quarantine authorities are gearing up efforts to conduct a nationwide COVID-19 antibody testing to determine what percentage of the population has been infected and has acquired immunity.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(KCDC) said on Tuesday that tests and surveys on around three-thousand serum samples, including those collected from coronavirus patients in Seoul, are underway. 

Kwon Jun-wook, deputy director general at KCDC, said a thousand people in Daegu and its surrounding North Gyeongsang Province, the two hardest-hit areas in the country, will also be surveyed in July and August. 

Under the government plan, blood samples will be collected from seven-thousand people across the country. 

While the antibody testing is expected to be completed around December, Kwon speculated the result will be little different from other countries, where immunity rates were found to be low.

KBS World Radio