It will be interesting to see if any big announcements in regards to resolving historical issues between the countries will be announced:
President Yoon Suk-yeol arrives for work at the presidential office in Seoul on Sept. 15, 2022. (Yonhap)
President Yoon Suk-yeol will hold his first-ever summit with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in New York next week on a trip that will include his attendance at the U.N. General Assembly and a separate meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden, his office said Thursday.
The meeting with Kishida will mark the first summit between the two countries in nearly three years since the last meeting in December 2019 and raises hope for improving relations frayed badly over wartime forced labor and other issues related to Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule.
It seems to me that the mask mandates should be limited to places with high risk individuals such as nursing homes and hospitals:
A sign posted in a cafe in Jung District, Seoul, May 3, reads that customers are required to wear a face mask. Newsis
After nearly two years since the indoor mask mandate was first implemented in Korea, experts are debating whether the government should review lifting the requirement, as a number of countries have lifted or eased the mandate.
To help curb the spread of the coronavirus, the government required mask wearing both outdoors and indoors starting from Oct. 13, 2020. The outdoor mask mandate was lifted on May 2 of this year, as the number of new infections showed a downward trend after the Omicron BA.1 and BA.2 wave peaked in March.
But the requirement to wear masks in indoor spaces such as offices, cafes, hospitals and public transportation has remained in place, with violators subject to a fine of 100,000 won ($72).
However, now that other countries such as Denmark and Singapore, along with states in the U.S., have removed or eased the mask requirement for indoor spaces, some are urging the Korean government to make similar adjustments.
“Ultimately, the indoor mask mandate, as well as the mandatory self-isolation rule for virus carriers should be scrapped,” said Jung Jae-hun, a professor of preventive medicine at Gachon Medical School. “There could be differing views (among experts and authorities) on when would be the right time to remove the measures, but Korea is at a stage to begin discussions on it.”
Considering that the vaccine does not prevent someone from getting COVID, the news that many people now no longer want the vaccine should not come as a surprise:
A person receives his fourth shot of the COVID-19 vaccine at a local clinic in Seongdong District, Seoul, July 18. Korea Times photo by Bae Woo-han
Nearly 10 million soon-to-expire COVID-19 vaccine doses are likely to be discarded in Korea amid waning demand, in sharp contrast to the early days of the national vaccination campaign when the country grappled with a scarce supply.
According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), as of Monday, there are a total of 14,208,000 stockpiled vaccine doses. They include 8.3 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, 2.7 million doses of Moderna, 1.98 million doses of Johnson & Johnson, 671,000 doses of Novavax and 609,000 doses of the SKYCovione, the country’s first domestically developed vaccine by SK Bioscience.
Considering that about 100,000 shots are being administered per week, at the current pace, about 10 million doses are likely to go to waste by the end of this year with their expiration dates approaching. The shelf life of COVID-19 vaccines is usually between six months to a year.
You would think all these people would have something better to do then make a fool of themselves over this issue:
A group of conservative activists and an anti-Japanese group opposing wartime sex slaves clash at a rally held near the Statue of Peace in central Seoul on Sept. 12, 2022. (Yonhap)
Scuffles plagued the site of a statue of a girl symbolizing victims of Japan’s wartime sexual slavery Sunday night as members of a right-wing organization raided the site and clashed with anti-Japanese activists guarding the statue.
The four-hour melee happened as members of New Freedom Solidarity held a surprise rally near the statue in central Seoul around 10 p.m. Sunday, demanding the breakup of a civic organization established to help victims of the sexual enslavement of Korean women during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule.
Clashes continued past midnight as the leader of the right-wing organization attempted to force his way near the statue and anti-Japanese activists tried to keep him away. One protester was taken to the hospital for exhaustion.
An anti-Japanese activist was also taken into custody for pushing a police officer at the scene.
Although police separated the two sides with police lines, they continued to clash with loudspeakers and caused inconvenience to people nearby before the conservative group finally left the area at around 2:10 a.m. Monday.
I feel for anyone that has to battle Chuseok traffic. I have had to do it once before and I said never again:
Most highways and roads were clogged with heavy traffic early Sunday, as people were traveling back home on the third day of the four-day Chuseok holiday.
Chuseok, the Korean autumn harvest celebration, is one of the country’s biggest traditional holidays and serves as a chance for family members to get together. Chuseok is celebrated on Aug. 15 in the lunar calendar, which fell on Saturday this year.
This is all the more reason why all the COVID testing at the airports should be stopped, to prevent testing fraud:
The Korean Embassy in Vietnam has stepped up efforts to prevent a coronavirus testing-related scam, with such fraud cases on the rise targeting Korean tourists in the Southeast Asian country when they return to Korea.
According to the embassy and the Korean foreign ministry, Wednesday, two embassy staffers visited the office of Vietjet Air in Hanoi two days earlier and took issue with the budget airline’s rejection of Korean travelers’ negative COVID-19 test results, which left them exposed to rapid antigen test fraud. Vietjet Air is a Vietnamese low-cost carrier (LCC), based in the capital city of Hanoi. (………)
The embassy’s complaints came as more Korean travelers in Vietnam have fallen victim to the rapid testing scam, sparking an outcry among them and raising the need for the Korean government to step in.
Until Sept. 2, all inbound travelers to Korea had to hand in negative PCR test results conducted within 48 hours or from rapid antigen tests within 24 hours preceding their departure for the country, but this rule has been lifted amid the overall recent downward trend in the number of daily new cases. However, a mandate to take a PCR test within one day after arrival in Korea remains unchanged.
According to the embassy, Vietjet frequently rejected Korean passengers’ negative test results, even if they were valid, and on-site brokers received a premium to give them an emergency last-minute test.
It is amazing how many people died trying to save cars that could have easily been repaired or fixed with insurance:
Rescue workers carry a survivor out of the flooded underground parking lot of an apartment building in Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province, southeastern South Korea, on Sept. 6, 2022, after nine residents went missing following the torrential rains caused by Typhoon Hinnamnor that hit the region. (Yonhap)
Nine people have been pulled from a flooded parking garage in the southeastern city of Pohang, two of them alive, with the seven others having died after being found in cardiac arrest, as the search continued for any remaining victims in the wake of Typhoon Hinnamnor.
All of them had been trapped in the underground parking lot at an apartment complex in Pohang, about 270 km southeast of Seoul, after going there to move their cars amid heavy downpours brought on by the typhoon.
Rescue workers searched the flooded garage and pulled the nine people out of the water.
I just don’t understand why people cannot just stay inside and wait until the storm passes. It seems every typhoon the casualty are caused by people not bunkering down inside:
This photo provided by a news reader shows an inundated river in the coastal city of Ulsan on Sept. 6, 2022.
Three people were found dead and eight others went missing in South Korea after Typhoon Hinnamnor passed by the southern part of the country Tuesday, authorities said.
Pohang city officials said seven people were reported to be out of contact after entering the inundated underground parking lot of an apartment building in the city at around 6:30 a.m. to remove their cars.
Rescuers are currently carrying out an operation to drain the parking garage and find those missing.
A 66-year-old woman who was unaccounted for after entering the underground parking garage of another apartment building in Pohang in the morning was found dead six hours later, the officials said.
It looks like South Korea got very lucky by not getting hit by the worse of Typhoon Hinnamnor:
Waves hit a seawall in Busan on Sept. 6, as the super strong Typhoon Hinnamnor approaches the Korean Peninsula. Yonhap
Super Typhoon Hinnamnor made landfall on Korea’s Geoje early Tuesday morning, possibly becoming the most powerful storm ever to hit the country.
The typhoon, the 11th this year, made landfall at the southeastern city of Geoje, South Gyeongsang Province at 4:50 a.m., according to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). Geoje city is made up of a number of islands, of which by far the largest is Geoje Island.
The strength of the typhoon when it hit Geoje was not immediately available, but the KMA said the typhoon was classified “very strong” when it passed through the southern island of Jeju at around midnight with an atmospheric pressure of 945 hectopascals (hPa) at its center and maximum wind speed of 45 kilometers per second.
“Hinnamnor is a very big typhoon with a radius of 400 kilometers, and can carry strong winds and heavy rainfall almost all across the country,” Han Sang-un, the chief forecaster at the KMA, told a press briefing, urging to minimize possible casualties.
You can read more at the link, but Ulleungdo is the next possible Korean location this typhoon might strike. Hopefully the cooler waters of the East Sea get this typhoon to die down a bit.
