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People crowd Seomun market in Daegu on Apr. 6, although the city’s COVID-19 threat has not vanished. (Yonhap News)

South Korea reported 47 new cases of COVID-19 on Apr. 6, the first time in 46 days that the number fell below 50. But the country’s public health authorities called on the public to participate even more actively in social distancing measures, insisting that it’s too soon to relax. Since people were actually more active and mobile during the first round of intense social distancing (Mar. 22-Apr. 5) than they’d been before, the government is looking into additional measures, such as helping churches move their services online.

“While the number of new cases dipped below 50, that’s largely because fewer tests are conducted on the weekend: 6,000 compared to over 10,000 on weekdays. That figure doesn’t mean we’ve reached the stage where we can relax,” a spokesperson for South Korea’s Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters said on Monday.

“There’s still a risk that cases imported from overseas could spread. The fact that we’re not able to do contact tracing for 5-10% of patients means there are infected people in communities that the public health officials haven’t been able to identify. This is a grave situation where the explosive level of community-based infection that we’ve seen in Europe and the US could happen at any time in South Korea as well.”

The public health authorities announced another goal on Monday: bringing COVID-19’s reproduction number — that is, the average number of people who catch the disease from an infected individual — below one.

The reason the authorities remain on alert is because public movement actually increased during the first period of intense social distancing, up 30% from late February. This past weekend alone, the number of people taking public transit rose by about 500,000.

Visual data about Seoul’s transient population released by the disaster safety headquarters on Monday showed a surge of visitors on Apr. 4 to commercial districts popular with young people, such as Myeongdong, Gangnam, and Hongdae, and good places for viewing the spring flowers, such as Yeouido, the banks of the Han River, and the area around Namsan, the mountain in central Seoul. There were 1,914 churches holding on-site services in Seoul on Sunday, about a hundred more than the week before (1,817). Seoul believes that more churches are reopening as Easter approaches on Apr. 12.

Data imaging of Seoul’s mobile population on Apr. 5. (Yonhap News)

This has led the government to look into ways to boost the efficacy of social distancing, such as providing support for online services and forcing the closure of facilities that violate quarantine regulations. The authorities have promised to boost monitoring and respond to violations by nightlife establishments and other businesses catering to the public by taking administrative actions, with punishment for repeat offenders.

Experts stress that being outside doesn’t provide surefire protection from the coronavirus. Kim Woo-ju, a professor of infectious disease at Korea University Guro Hospital, pointed to a measles outbreak at Disneyland in California in 2015. “When people are infected outside, it’s even harder to do contact tracing. New cases can occur at any time, not only at churches and hospitals but also in other locations. That’s why we need to take stern administrative action against offending facilities,” Kim said.

“There’s only so much we can do through punishment and sanctions. Our only choice is solidarity, the commitment to protecting both ourselves and other people,” said Kam Sin, professor of preventive medicine at Kyungpook National University Hospital.

By Park Da-hae, Noh Ji-won, and Chae Yoon-tae, staff reporters

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