South Korea Depends Military To Handle COVID-19

Royal Guards exchange daily demonstration at Gyeongbok Palace in central Seoul, South Korea (Antara, Reuters / Heo Ran)

JAKARTA - South Korea (South Korea) will mobilize military forces in the capital city of Seoul. The military deployment was carried out to help health workers deal with the spike in COVID-19 cases.

In South Korea, the death toll is increasing. Critical patients also jumped. Friday, December 11, South Korea reported 689 new cases of corona virus infection.

Of the 689 new cases, 673 were locally transmitted, bringing the total COVID-19 cases to 40,786, said the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA).

Meanwhile, the death toll due to corona virus infection in South Korea increased by eight to 572 people, according to the KDCA report.

The spike in cases dealt a blow to South Korea's proud pandemic response system that has successfully used invasive tracking, testing and quarantine to evade lockdowns and contain previous waves of coronavirus outbreaks.

South Korea has also managed to keep the number of additional cases below 50 per day for most of the summer.

South Korean authorities also this week scrambled to build hospital beds using shipping containers to ease the burden on medical facilities caused by the latest influx of coronavirus in the country.

The number of COVID-19 patients who are in serious or severe condition has risen to close to 170. That prompted health authorities to set up more hospital beds nationwide.

Calling the current wave of the coronavirus outbreak a critical crisis, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said he would send around 800 military, police and government officials in every district in the Seoul region and beyond to help track potential patients.

Frontline medical workers and staff continue to struggle daily to carry out endless epidemiological investigations, carry out testing and secure inadequate supplies of bedding.

All these efforts were made as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases continued to grow in various areas including the Seoul metropolitan area, Chung said during a government working meeting on Friday, December 11.

"In the end, efforts to reduce the wave of the corona outbreak this time are the key to winning in efforts to prevent the virus in the Seoul region and its surroundings," said Chung.

Most of the new COVID-19 cases in South Korea have been reported in the capital Seoul, the port city of Incheon and Gyeonggi Province - which is home to 13.5 million people and surrounds the two cities.