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People wait in line to get tested for COVID-19 at a temporary screening center in Seoul on Wednesday. (Yonhap News)

Wednesday marked the 17th day since the South Korean government implemented Level 4 of social distancing in the greater Seoul area to curb the fourth wave of COVID-19, but those measures haven’t stopped the disease from spreading.

That’s partly because of the high transmissibility of the Delta variant of the coronavirus and partly because there are more silent spreaders this time than in previous waves. But the government is most worried that more Koreans are on the move as vacation season arrives on the peninsula.

Korea’s Central Disease Control Headquarters reported 1,896 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday. That was the largest daily tally so far in the pandemic, beating the previous record set just six days ago, on July 22 (1,842 cases). There were 1,212 locally transmitted cases in the greater Seoul area, setting another pandemic record, while the 611 cases outside of greater Seoul was the most so far in the fourth wave.

Korea’s disease control authorities are somewhat relieved that the curve has flattened.

“Our analysis of the current situation suggests that we’ve reached the point where the rapidly increasing surge of infections in the greater Seoul area has stopped and the infection rate has leveled off,” said Son Yeong-rae, director of strategy and planning at Korea’s Central Disaster Management Headquarters, during the daily briefing.

“The next two weeks are the most critical time that will determine whether the infection rate, which is currently holding steady, will shift toward a decline. We’ll have to monitor the efficacy [of the current quarantine measures] while reviewing whether tougher measures are needed,” Son said.

The government’s primary goal is to bring the daily caseload back down to where it was before the fourth wave began. But this wave has produced a large number of asymptomatic individuals spreading the disease at the community level, which means that the number of people being infected each day is greater than ever before.

Another new factor in the equation is that the highly transmissible Delta variant is driving Korea’s current wave of COVID-19. Other factors reducing the efficacy of social distancing, the government says, are public burnout from the protracted pandemic and the greater amount of travel during the summer vacation season.

Korea’s Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters (CDSCH) found that the amount of travel around the country had increased slightly last week when it analyzed mobile phone movement data provided by Statistics Korea. The data recorded 226,040,000 movements around the country on July 19-25, up 0.8% (1.87 million) from the previous week (July 12-18), when there were 224,170,000 movements.

Mobile phone movement was up 1% (1.08 million) from the previous week in the greater Seoul area and up 0.7% (790,000) in the reset of the country.

The CDSCH also compared mobile phone movement last week to the first week of January, when the third wave of the pandemic began to subside. Movement around the country last week was 28% higher than in the first week of January, when there were 175 million movements, while movement in the greater Seoul area was 18% higher in the same period.

One thing that sets the fourth wave apart from previous waves is that more infections occur through small-scale interactions in people’s daily routines than through large infection clusters involving hundreds of patients. The disease control authorities classify incidents in which five or more people get COVID-19 as infection clusters and anything below that as infections occurring through contact with individual carriers.

When the CDSCH analyzed the routes of infection for everyone infected with COVID-19 during the third wave which ran from Nov. 13, 2020, to Jan. 20, 2021, it found that 32.2% of patients had been infected through contact with individual carriers. But an examination of routes of infection during the past three weeks shows that individual contact accounted for 41.4% of cases in the first week of July (July 4-10), 45.1% in the second week (July 11-17), and 49.7% in the third week (July 18-24).

By Seo Hye-mi, staff reporter

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