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People line up for testing at a screening clinic in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, on May 28. (Kim Bong-gyu, senior staff photographer)

The coronavirus cluster at the Coupang logistics center in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province, is spreading at an alarming rate. The number of new confirmed cases reported on May 28 rose sharply to 79. As of 10 am on May 28, the number of cases connected with the Bucheon center had increased to 82, and another case had also been reported at a Coupang logistics center in Goyang, also in Gyeonggi Province. Two of the workers infected at the Bucheon logistics center also work at call centers in Bucheon and Incheon’s Bupyeong District, and the individual at the Bucheon call center has transmitted the disease to others there in an example of third-generation transmission. There are concerns that South Korea will see a repeat of the infection cluster at the Guro call center, which resulted in 166 infections.

Media interviews with employees at the Coupang logistics center suggest that the transmission cluster could have been predicted. Employees said the job made them so sweaty that their masks often got torn or fell off. Hundreds of people had their meals in the same room, without any measures to keep them apart. The disease control authorities said that the coronavirus was detected on the hats and even the shoes used by workers in the logistics center’s cold storage warehouse.

On top of such shoddy management, the company made matters even worse by failing to take prompt action after learning that one of its employees had been infected. While Coupang didn’t give its employees enough information about the infection, the action taken by online grocery store Market Kurly when it learned about an infected worker on May 27 offers a striking contrast: Market Kurly immediately closed the logistics warehouse in question and even informed customers about what had happened and how it would combat the outbreak. Gyeonggi Province Governor Lee Jae-myung has already slapped a two-week closure on Coupang’s Bucheon logistics center, starting May 28. There needs to be a thorough investigation of whether Coupang has violated any other disease control regulations.

On May 28, the South Korean government convened an emergency meeting of relevant ministers in connection with the COVID-19 outbreak in the Seoul Capital Area (SCA) and decided to close all state-operated public facilities in the SCA -- including parks, museums, public and national theaters, and training centers -- until June 14. The government also recommended that nightlife establishments, cram schools, and computer gaming centers limit their operations.

“If we see even more new cases, we could revert to social distancing,” said Minister of Health and Welfare Park Neung-hoo, who also serves as first vice director of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters (CDSCH).

So soon after students finally began returning to the classroom after such a long wait, cracks are showing in the disease control edifice that the authorities and public have striven to build. If not for problems such as the deceit of the cram school teacher in Incheon and the lax response of the Coupang logistics center, appropriate disease control measures would probably have been enough to prevent such infection clusters from occurring. The few people who engage in reckless behavior that places the community and especially our growing children in grave danger must be held strictly responsible for their actions.

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