Category: Korea-General Topics

The mandate for testing only foreigners continues to cause controversy in South Korea:

Several South Korea provinces and cities continued to require coronavirus testing for foreign workers, despite a request from the national government that prompted Seoul to end its mandate amid international outcry.

Last week the headquarters of the nation’s pandemic control effort asked local governments to end mandatory testing for foreigners, and improve testing policies to eliminate discrimination or rights violations. But only Seoul scrapped its controversial order.

The same day, Daegu, the fourth-largest city, with a population of 2.5 million, doubled down with a second order expanding the number of foreign workers that needed to be tested. No foreign workers among 2,553 in the first round tested positive, Daegu said in a statement.

Reuters

You can read more at the link.

Her is the latest stupid online conspiracy theory in South Korea:

Daegu police on Wednesday opened an investigation into claims circulating online that President Moon Jae-in’s vaccine was secretly switched –– and he did not get the AstraZeneca jab.  
   
On Tuesday, Moon and First Lady Kim Jung-sook became the first Koreans over 65 to be vaccinated for Covid-19. The first couple got their shots at a public health center in Jongno, central Seoul, near the Blue House, ahead of the president’s trip to Britain for a Group of Seven summit in June.  
   
A video of the president and first lady being administered the AstraZeneca vaccine was part of the government’s attempt to calm public fears over the vaccine’s safety, following two local reports of blood clots arising in patients who received AstraZeneca shots. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link, but if the President was going to fake a vaccination couldn’t he have just had water injected into his arm? Why bother switching vials while being filmed?

Notice how these politicians are always pushing out their goals to dates they will likely not even be alive to avoid political responsibility for their decisions:

President Moon Jae-in on Friday declared 2021 as the starting year of South Korea’s green transition for daily infrastructure, reiterating his commitment to the Green New Deal policy.

Attending a government strategy meeting on the Green New Deal policy at the Boryeong Thermal Power Plant in Boryeong, South Chungcheong Province, Moon said the nation’s political, economic, social and cultural sectors should be overhauled “with an extraordinary determination that the Green New Deal is the only way for the nation to survive.”
The Moon administration has been campaigning for the Green New Deal aimed at fostering environment friendly industries in tandem with a push for balanced national development.

On his vision of South Korea achieving carbon neutrality and reducing carbon emissions to zero by 2050, Moon said the nation has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 10.8 percent over the past two years, thanks in part to the earlier-than-scheduled closures of coal power plants.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link.

Historian Robert Neff has another interesting historical nugget in the Korea Times about one of the first reported bank robberies in South Korea:

One of the first bank robberies in Korea took place in Jemulpo (modern Incheon) on June 25, 1892 ― a dreadfully hot day. A young Japanese employee of the First National Bank of Japan went to the Korean Customs Office to collect the daily duties on goods being imported and exported through the port. It was a fairly substantial amount of money ― nearly 700 dollars.

Korea Times

You can read the rest at the link.

The latest Korean manufactured satellite has been launched:

South Korea’s next-generation midsized observation satellite successfully entered its target orbit and made its first contact with a base station on Monday, the science ministry said, marking the country’s latest step to boost its space industry.

The 540-kilogram satellite made contact with the Svalbard Satellite Station in Norway around 100 minutes after its launch on Russia’s Soyuz-2.1a rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at around 11:07 a.m. (local time), according to the Ministry of Science and ICT.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Here is an interesting tourism idea to promote a remote part of South Korea:

 Dressed all in purple, bent-over women held long rakes aloft as they walked in a line to a lavender field to carry out some pruning on an island in southwest South Korea.

Inspired by their native balloon flower, residents of the Banwol and Bakji Islands, known as the ‘Purple Islands’, have painted their houses, roads and bridges in shades of the hue, and planted purple flowers such as lavender and asters to transform their town into a tourist attraction.

Reuters

You can read more at the link.

You know it is spring time when the major yellow dust storms start rolling in:

Local air quality may further worsen later this week, as high levels of yellow dust originating from the inland deserts in northern China are forecast to blow into the Korean Peninsula, which has been hit by heavy concentrations of ultrafine dust particles for nearly a week, the state weather agency said Monday.

According to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), yellow dust originating from the extensive inland areas of China and Mongolia and the Gobi Desert is expected to arrive over South Korea beginning early Tuesday morning.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Doctors have concluded that so far 8 out of the 11 reported vaccine deaths were caused by pre-existing conditions:

South Korea has tentatively concluded that there is no causal relation between COVID-19 vaccines and eight out of 11 reported deaths after vaccinations, health authorities said Monday.

Investigations were concluded on the eight people who died within days of receiving AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccines. An epidemiological survey is still under way for three other recipients.

The authorities tentatively concluded that their deaths were highly likely to be connected to their pre-existing conditions.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but all 8 people who died after getting the vaccine were not only unwell, but were in longterm care facilities as well. The government is stilling doing epidemiological surveys on the remaining three deaths.

This same phenomenon is devastating many businesses in university town’s in the United States as well:

The streets near the campus of Hannam University in Daejeon used to be packed with students at this time of year.    
   
Now only advertisements plastered on the windows of empty stores greet visitors.  
   
“Many of us in the area are going out of business, as most university classes are being held online in the pandemic and students are not returning to the campus,” one store owner in the neighborhood told the JoongAng Ilbo on Wednesday. “I’m afraid that at this rate, half of the stores in the area will go out of business in the next couple of years.” 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

Due to a surge in coronavirus cases among the foreign population in Gyeongi province all foreign workers must now take a free of charge COVID-19 test by March 22nd:

All foreign workers in Gyeonggi Province, which surrounds Seoul, were ordered Monday to take the coronavirus test before March 22, as part of authorities’ efforts to cope with a recent spike in COVID-19 cases in foreigner-dense areas and workplaces.

The latest administrative order from the provincial government of Gyeonggi was delivered to about 85,000 foreign workers in the nation’s most populous province via their employers, officials said.

Under the order, the migrant workers hired by some 25,000 workplaces with at least one foreign employee are obliged to take the virus test between Monday and March 22, they said.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but the article said that 151 foreign workers in Dongducheon tested positive for the coronavirus. That explains why U.S. soldiers at Camp Casey currently have a travel ban on them.