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A line of people waiting to be tested for COVID-19 forms outside of a screening center in southern Gwangju’s Nam District on Wednesday afternoon. (Yonhap News)

On the evening of Dec. 11, a medical worker was having a drink with some friends at a bar in the Jinwol neighborhood of southern Gwangju. The gathering began at 8:44 pm and lasted a little over an hour. The medical worker lives in Gwangju and commutes to Hampyeong County for work.

Meanwhile, a Gwangju waterworks employee was at the same bar until 9 pm. The medical worker and waterworks employee didn’t know each other, and they shared that space for just 16 minutes. But the latter became infected with the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus during that period of contact with the former, who had caught the virus in Hampyeong.

After going to work, the waterworks employee joined his colleagues at a restaurant in the city’s Bongseon neighborhood. As of Wednesday afternoon, four workers and two customers at the restaurant had been infected with Omicron — and that’s not even counting the waterworks employee’s coworkers. At the waterworks, the Omicron variant has been detected in nine of 24 people who have tested positive for COVID-19.

Korea’s public health authorities found the waterworks employee while they were investigating the movements of people who had been at the Bongseon restaurant after COVID-19 cases were linked there. That was when they learned that the medical worker and waterworks employee had briefly been at the same bar in Jinwol. They’d found the link between Gwangju and Hampyeong.

“It’s hard for contact tracers to keep up with Omicron because of its extreme transmissibility,” said Song Hye-ja, head of Gwangju’s office of infectious disease management.

This chain of Omicron infection began with someone who arrived in Korea from Iran on Nov. 25. The virus spread through a family get-together in Seoul; a kindergarten in Iksan, North Jeolla Province; and a nursery in Hampyeong County before reaching the bar and restaurant in Gwangju 16 days later.

On Wednesday, the Omicron virus was detected in Daegu, which was the 10th major administrative region reached by the infectious variant. The others are Seoul, Gyeonggi Province, Incheon, Gwangju, South Jeolla Province, North Jeolla Province, Sejong City, North Chungcheong Province and South Gyeongsang Province.

As of the previous day, Korea had detected Omicron in 234 people altogether. Adding the new case in Daegu brings the total on Wednesday to at least 235. The number of people suspected of having Omicron rose 54 on the previous day to reach a cumulative total of 108.

“We confirmed that a Daegu male resident in his 40s who entered Korea from the US on Dec. 13 is infected with the Omicron variant,” the city government of Daegu said on Wednesday.

The patient arrived in Daegu by way of Incheon Airport on Dec. 13 and tested positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 15. The city of Daegu tested all 566 staff and students at the school attended by the patient’s child, but all results came back negative. Even so, 38 people who came into close contact with the child were asked to self-quarantine, and 124 are being actively monitored.

“In Daegu, there has been one case of additional transmission following entry from overseas, and we are tracing contacts for two family members living with that individual,” said Park Young-joon, head of epidemiological investigation analysis team at Korea’s Central Disease Control Headquarters, during a press briefing on Wednesday afternoon.

By Jung Dae-ha and Kim Kyu-hyeon, staff reporters

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