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A foreign tourist wearing a mask visits the National Folk Museum of Korea on Feb. 3. (Baek So-ah, staff photographer)

As of Feb. 4, any South Koreans who have come within 2m of a symptomatic coronavirus patient or been in an enclosed space with them when they were coughing without a face mask on will be classified as having been in contact with an infected individual and will be placed under home quarantine. As early as Feb. 7, testing for the novel coronavirus will take place not only at government-run centers but also at 50 privately operated medical centers that have polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing equipment and trained personnel.

Active monitoring and quarantine ends for individuals without any suspicious symptoms after 14 days have passed since coming into contact with an infected individual. As a result, monitoring ended for the 45 people who came into contact with the first patient as of 12:01 am on Feb. 3.

“We’re planning to eliminate the distinction between ‘close contact’ and ‘routine contact’ and place everyone who’s come into contact with infected individuals under home quarantine. Public servants at local governments will be made responsible for managing and supporting each person under home quarantine,” a spokesperson for the South Korean government’s central disease control headquarters said during the regular briefing on Monday.

The classification of who has come into contact will be made by epidemiological investigators. Contact is defined as coming within 2m of an infected individual displaying symptoms or being in an enclosed space when they’re coughing without wearing a mask. This is a broader definition than that used previously for identifying who came into “close contact,” the spokesperson for the disease control headquarters explained.

The disease control headquarters has decided to reassess the risk of transmission for individuals previously classified as having come into “routine contact” with an infected individual. Those who fall under the new definition of contact will be placed under home quarantine, while those who are deemed to be at a low risk of transmission will continue to remain under active monitoring— meaning that their local public health center keeps tabs on their health status — until 14 days have passed since contact was made.

As of Monday, a total of 913 individuals are regarded as having come into contact with those who have tested positive for the disease; 474 of these made close contact, and 439 made routine contact. While the authorities have thus far only released the names of the businesses at which people came into close contact with infected patients after their symptoms manifested, in the future they will release the names of all businesses where any contact was made with those patients.

The disease control headquarters is also looking into broadening the starting point of contact from the time when symptoms appeared to one day prior to their appearance. This follows a string of reports both inside and outside South Korea about the possibility of transmission occurring even before symptoms appear, during the incubation period.

While the government has already announced it will be requiring testing for anyone who exhibits symptoms such as fever and coughing within 14 days of entering the country from anywhere within China, it probably won’t confirm the exact method of defining cases until around Feb. 7. Previously, individuals weren’t subject to testing until they’d been diagnosed with pneumonia. But to increase the number of people being tested, the authorities will also have to increase its supply of the reagents needed for testing for the disease.

“We’re currently conducting a quality assessment of domestically manufactured reagents. After getting emergency approval for their use from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, we plan to move ahead with production and distribution,” said Chung Eun-gyeong, head of the disease control headquarters.

“Before private hospitals can make use of this, we have to train the staff and assess not only the diagnostic reagents but also the testing equipment, so as to ensure the accuracy of the test results. Our goal is to enable the tests to be administered at private hospitals as early as Feb. 7.”

Considering that the novel coronavirus is a new disease, there was no way to determine who had contracted it at the beginning of the outbreak. At first, the government would first test a suspected patient for a coronavirus (the pancoronavirus method) and then, if they tested positive, analyze the nucleic acid sequence of the patient’s sample, which takes about 24 hours.

Later, a more specific test for the novel coronavirus (taking about six hours) was developed, which has been available at Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 18 public health and environmental research labs around the country since Jan. 31. It’s this second testing method that will be made available to the private sector.

By Park Hyun-jung, staff reporter

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