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Participants in a press briefing at which healthcare workers shared testimonies from the frontlines, held at Korean Healthcare Workers’ Trade Union headquarters in Seoul’s Jongno District on Thursday morning, speak about the realities faced by workers in the medical field following the COVID-19 pandemic and the implementation of disease control policies in South Korea. (Shin So-young/The Hankyoreh)

Korea has reached 7,000 new cases of COVID-19 each day, prompting the analysis that the country is nearing capacity at its hospitals. But some are arguing that the country’s medical system has already collapsed.

“There’s widespread criticism on the front lines about a ‘cycle of death’ in which new patients can’t be brought in until someone dies of COVID-19 and frees up a bed,” said Jeong Hyeong-jun, a member of the group Association of Physicians for Humanism.

The public health system and civic groups say that vulnerable groups such as the homeless and migrant workers are effectively being neglected by the government’s adoption of “home care” as its standard policy.

The Korean Healthcare Workers’ Trade Union, which operates under the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, and other civic groups in the area of public health organized a conference at the union’s headquarters in Seoul’s Jongno District on Thursday for front-line workers to testify about the COVID-19 crisis.

“The ICU occupancy rate is being misunderstood. An occupancy rate of 80% means that the ICUs are full, since it’s impossible to run at 100% capacity,” said Jeong, one of the presenters at the conference.

“Those who need to be in residential care centers are at home, those who need to be in hospitals are in residential care centers, and those who need treatment in the ICU are in ordinary hospital rooms,” Jeong said.

“Through October, the percentage of critical patients at COVID-19 wards who need measures that go beyond oxygenation was around 10%-20%. Now, that percentage has apparently risen to 30%-50%. Some COVID-19 hospitals are telling older patients upon admission that they can’t get treatment in ICUs and are asking them or their guardians to fill out consent forms for halting life-sustaining treatment,” he added.

Some testified that even private sector hospitals were rejecting “challenging patients,” shunting them to government-run hospitals, even amid the surge of COVID-19. Choi Eun-yeong, a member of the Nurses Taking Action Society who works as a nurse at a government-designated quarantine ward at Seoul National University Hospital, spoke on this.

“At one [COVID-19] ward [at Seoul National University Hospital], six out of 12 beds were occupied by new mothers. There are only two places around Seoul that will admit new mothers who have come down with COVID-19 — Seoul National University Hospital and the National Medical Center,” Choi said.

Others pointed out that since the government made home care its default policy for people with COVID-19, the unhoused, migrant workers, and people with disabilities had been left out in the cold.

“Self-quarantine and home care are out of reach for the homeless. When a homeless person runs a fever, the only way to stop an infection from spreading is to put them in touch with a hospital, a temporary treatment center, or a residential treatment center and get them off the street. But the fact is that we’re just leaving them where they are,” said Rosemary, student body president at the Lower Village Homeless Night School and a volunteer who works with the homeless.

“When migrant workers are infected, they aren’t in a position to treat themselves at home,” said Udaya Rai, president of the Migrants’ Trade Union.

“The majority of migrant workers live in dormitories that they share with other people, and the dormitories themselves are in poor condition. Most of the dormitories are containers, prefab structures, or temporary buildings at the workplace. Infected people are having a hard time because they’re not able to [immediately] go to treatment facilities.”

“Last month, a person with a disability came down with COVID-19. But when we tried to get them into a hospital, we were just told to wait because the wards were full. Then when we asked the government to send an emergency care worker to help the patient with home care, we were told that caregivers could be sent to people in self-quarantine but not to COVID-19 patients,” said Kim Pil-sun, chief strategist for Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination.

Even patients at nursing homes are having to wait longer for access to hospital space. As one example, Bang Eun-suk, head of the nursing facility organizational bureau at the Korean Healthcare Workers’ Trade Union, brought up an infection cluster at a municipal nursing home in Seoul.

“After one nursing assistant tested positive for COVID-19 on Nov. 23, a total of 16 other people were infected, including nine residents at the nursing home. One of the infected residents died after being transferred to a hospital, and another died on Dec. 6 at the nursing home, without ever getting transferred to a hospital,” Bang said.

“Currently, a total of five older people are being quarantined in a room [at the nursing home]. We’re looking into ways to transfer them to a hospital, but we don’t have a specific plan yet,” she added.

As of 5 pm on Wednesday, the occupancy rate at COVID-19 ICUs in the greater Seoul area was at 85.0%, while the occupancy rate for all of Korea was at 78.8%.

Experts argue that the government needs to take more proactive steps to set up government-organized medical services, which would include securing more hospital space.

Woo Seok-gyun, co-president of the Association of Physicians for Humanism, argued that the government needs to find more hospital space for treating COVID-19 patients at Korea’s biggest hospitals.

“If we postponed [procedures for] non-emergency and non-critical patients, we could open up 10-20% of hospital space at top-tier general hospitals.”

By Park Jun-yong and Kwon Ji-dam, staff reporters

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