Tag: South Korea

Some how the United States is not on this list?:

 South Korea on Monday started to require foreigners arriving from high-risk countries to submit a certificate showing they tested negative for the new coronavirus, as a steady rise in imported cases has strained its anti-virus fight.

All foreign arrivals from the four countries — Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan — are obligated to hand in health certificates proving they have tested negative for COVID-19 on a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test. 

South Korea has also ordered regular flights from such countries to limit the number of passengers to 60 percent of capacity. Those who depart for countries with large outbreaks will face strict entry processes when returning to South Korea, health authorities said.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but it looks like the 14 day mandatory quarantine is not working to stop new infections.

Congratulations to this taxi driver for becoming the new most hated man in Korea:

Public anger has been boiling up over a taxi driver who stopped an ambulance carrying an emergency patient from going to a hospital while demanding that the ambulance driver deal with a minor fender bender between the two cars first.

The minor collision occurred in Seoul’s southeastern Gangdong-gu, June 8. According to the son of the patient, the ambulance driver told the cabbie that he would settle the dispute after taking the patient to the hospital, but the cabbie kept demanding that the car accident be handled first and forced the ambulance to stay in the middle of the road.

While the two drivers quarreled for about 10 minutes, another ambulance arrived and took the patient, a lung cancer patient in her 80s. In the end, the patient died in the emergency room, five hours after she arrived at the hospital. 

In a petition the son posted on the website run by the presidential office, he claimed the patient missed the so-called golden time needed for timely treatment due to the taxi driver.

Korea Times

You can read more at the link, but the ambulance driver should of just drove past this guy after the accident.

Unfortunately the Mayor Park Won-soon has been found dead in northern Seoul:

Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon was found dead in northern Seoul, police said Friday, after he was reported missing by his family.

Park’s daughter had told police that her father’s phone was turned off after he left their home after leaving a message that sounded like a will.

Yonhap

Here is a YTN News report about the death of Mayor Park:

According to the YTN News report Mayor Park was found dead in slopes of Bukhansan mountain near Waryong Park. The below map shows where the park is located at in Seoul with red tree icon:

It has not been confirmed if this is suicide yet or not, but according to what this daughter has said, it does appear to be a suicide. If confirmed this would be the second major political suicide since 2009 to rock South Korea. In 2009 former President Roh Moo-hyun committed suicide when him and his family was faced with corruption probes.

Condolences to Mayor Park’s family and friends.

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.

Dr. Tara O has another nugget on the appeasement of North Korea by the Moon administration:

At the 70th Anniversary of the Korean War commemoration event in South Korea, the North Korean anthem was played prior to the South Korean national anthem.  The annual event, which is usually held during the day, was held late at night for the first time on June 25, 2020, with Korean War veterans and foreign guests.  The U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accountability Agency (DPAA) sent the remains of 147 Republic of Korea (ROK) soldiers who died during the Korean War; the remains were initially returned from North Korea.  South Korean president Moon Jae-in, after skipping the event for the first three years of his presidency, attended the commemoration event for the first time.

East Asia Research Center

You can read much more at the link, but this is like playing verses from Horst-Wessel-Lied as part of the Star Spangled Banner during a Normandy Commemoration.

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.