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Passengers arriving from overseas at Incheon International Airport on Wednesday leave the airport through the exit for fully vaccinated travelers exempt from two-week mandatory quarantine. (Yonhap News)

A new system introduced as of this month exempts travelers arriving in South Korea from mandatory quarantine if they have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 overseas — but 10 of those who recently avoided quarantine through this system subsequently tested positive for the virus, it has been learned.

The fact that five of those travelers had been inoculated with the Sinopharm vaccine has prompted some to suggest a re-examination of exemption eligibility is in order.

South Korea’s Central Disaster Management Headquarters (CDMH) announced Thursday that of the 14,305 fully vaccinated travelers who had been exempted from arrival quarantine requirements as of Wednesday, 10 were found to have tested positive for COVID-19 after their arrival.

The passengers included eight arriving from the United Arab Emirates — five who had received the Sinopharm vaccine, two who had received the Pfizer vaccine, and one child under the age of six years. Another passenger arriving from Uganda had received the AstraZeneca vaccine, while a passenger arriving from Poland had received the Pfizer vaccine.

As a vaccination incentive measure, the South Korean government introduced a system as of July 1 granting fully vaccinated foreign nationals the same exemptions from mandatory two-week quarantine as South Korean nationals when arriving for visits with immediate family; visits for funerals and other humanitarian purposes; and visits for important business, academic, or public interest purposes.

Unvaccinated children under the age of six are also currently eligible to receive quarantine waivers if they arrive from overseas with parents who are both fully vaccinated.

But even those eligible for quarantine exemptions must submit a negative result for a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test performed within 72 hours before departure and undergo testing on the first and sixth or seventh day after they arrive in South Korea.

Of the 10 exempted individuals who tested positive, all but the child under the age of six submitted certificates of negative test results.

“Different countries have been tying vaccination to quarantine exemptions in the interests of achieving a balance between disease prevention and a return to daily life, and we’re operating a system to identify breakthrough infections early on through testing,” said Son Young-rae, head of the CDMH social strategy group.

“The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency is currently assessing the situation and risks with breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated international travelers, and it plans to examine its current guidelines based on its findings,” he added.

Experts argue that the quarantine exemption system should be reexamined.

“Ten people is not a large number, but the key thing is that the possibility of additional transmission is very high,” said Eom Joong-sik, a professor of infectious disease at Gachon University Gil Medical Center.

“We already have a response system in place with facility-based quarantines. The quarantine exemptions are an excessively bold decision without very little evidence to support it,” he said.

He also said the approach was “out of balance with the suspension of indoor mask-wearing exemptions and other incentives for fully vaccinated people in South Korea” amid the current fourth wave of COVID-19 infections.

“Quarantining arriving international passengers is the right thing to do, even if they have been fully vaccinated,” he added.

Additionally, the fact that half of the breakthrough infections were found among people who had received the Sinopharm vaccine has some arguing that it is not appropriate to waive quarantine requirements for people inoculated with Chinese vaccines, the effectiveness of which has not been clearly established.

At the time the World Health Organization (WHO) granted emergency use approval, the Chinese pharmaceutical companies Sinopharm and Sinovac reported that their vaccines had prevention rates of 78% and 51%, respectively — significantly lower than the 95% rate for the Pfizer vaccine and 94.1% rate for the Moderna vaccine.

Indeed, the incidence of confirmed cases has been rapidly rising in countries where most of those vaccinated received one of the two vaccines, including Mongolia, Bahrain and Chile.

For an overseas traveler to be recognized as fully vaccinated, they have to have been inoculated a full sequence of the recommended doses of one of the vaccines approved for emergency use by the WHO — namely, those developed by Pfizer, Janssen, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Covishield, Sinopharm and Sinovac — within the same country at least two weeks earlier.

Quarantine exemption benefits are not granted even to fully vaccinated individuals arriving from 21 countries seen as posing risks of introducing more transmissible virus variants, including India, South Africa and Tanzania.

By Kim Ji-hoon, staff reporter

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