How
South Korea Lost Control of Its Coronavirus Outbreak
By Suki
Kim
March 4, 2020
On February 24th, Ha Tae-kyung, a South Korean
National Assembly member and a co-chairman of the New Conservative Party, was
on a high-speed train to Seoul from Busan, the country’s second-largest city,
when he heard that the assembly had cancelled that day’s session and shut down.
A participant in the previous week’s parliamentary forum had tested positive
for covid-19, and several
politicians were now undergoing a medical screening. “A virus wouldn’t
discriminate if it’s a Parliament, the Blue House, or a City Hall,” Ha told me
in a phone interview. “But it was the first time in my career that I
experienced the parliament closing for such a reason.”
The coronavirus
epidemic, which was first detected in Wuhan, China, is having a rapidly
intensifying political impact on neighboring countries. In Japan, Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe has been harshly criticized for his government’s handling
of a cruise-ship outbreak that has resulted in at least six deaths and seven
hundred infections. In South Korea, which has reported thirty-five deaths and
more than fifty-six hundred infections—the highest number after China—the virus
is threatening the Presidency of Moon Jae-in.
This matters because of
who Moon is and what his Presidency means for South Koreans. In 2017, Moon, a
former human-rights lawyer and Democratic Party candidate, was elected in an
emergency election following the impeachment and removal of President Park
Geun-hye, a conservative who is now serving a twenty-five-year prison sentence
for abuse of power and corruption. Public anger, which culminated in massive
street protests by millions of Koreans, had roots in the 2014 sinking of the ferry M.V. Sewol, in which nearly
three hundred teen-agers drowned. The accident revealed fundamental failures in
the Korean governmental system and neglect by the head of state, who was absent
in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. The National Assembly held hearings
to investigate President Park’s whereabouts during what they called “the golden
time” when lives might have been saved. During his campaign, Moon pledged that
a President and the Blue House must serve as the “control tower” during
national disasters. That promise now haunts his Presidency.
On January 26th, three
days after China’s lockdown on Wuhan, the Korean Medical Association, the
country’s largest association of doctors, urged the government to temporarily
bar entry to all travellers arriving from mainland China. Moon’s government did
not heed that warning. Instead, it donated a million and a half face masks to
China. Moon’s defenders point out that the World Health Organization does not
recommend a travel ban for virus prevention, but Dr. Choi Jae-wook, professor
of Preventive Medicine at Koryo University and the chairman of the K.M.A.’s
scientific-verification committee, told me that countries must adapt when
facing a potential pandemic. “In South Korea, there were fewer than ten
infected back then and they had all come through China,” Dr. Choi said. “At the
time, there were seventy thousand people coming from China per day. Sure, they
can check for any sign of fever at the airport, but many show no symptoms, and
some get sick only afterward. The foremost priority for any infectious disease
is to stop contagion, and the most basic solution in this case was a
restriction.”
Four days later, on
January 30th, the W.H.O. declared a global health
emergency, and several countries, including the United States and
Australia, placed a temporary ban on travellers from China. Other nearby
countries, including Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, Taiwan, the
Philippines, and Singapore, quickly did so as well. As of today, more than
seventy nations have imposed a temporary ban. In South Korea, Moon faced his
“control-tower” moment, the brief “golden-time” window when his response might
have limited the country’s outbreak. He declined to impose a full travel ban.
Japanese Prime Minister Abe declined as well. Both leaders had plans in place
for spring summit visits by Chinese President Xi Jinping. China is South Korea’s
largest trading partner, and Chinese make up about half of the seventeen
million tourists who visit the country annually. On February 4th, five days
after the W.H.O. declared an emergency, South Korea enacted a limited ban,
which barred entry by any foreigners who had visited China’s Hubei Province in
the previous two weeks. (Due to China’s lockdown of the province, no one was
travelling in and out of Hubei anyway.) Moon’s critics dismissed the limited
step as an empty gesture to placate Koreans demanding a full ban.
On February 13th, as the
official count of infections in China approached sixty thousand, Moon announced
that the virus had been contained in South Korea and predicted it would “disappear before long.” He
urged Koreans to return to their normal lives. A week later, on February 20th,
in a thirty-minute phone call with Xi, Moon pledged South Korea’s unending
support for China’s fight against the coronavirus, saying that “China’s
difficulties are our difficulties” and reconfirming the upcoming summit with
the Chinese President. That same day, Moon and his wife hosted a chapaguri party
(the instant noodle combination made famous by the Oscar-winning film “Parasite”) at the Blue House for the film’s
director and cast; photos of the festivity circulated widely on social media.
By that afternoon, the number of infections in South Korea had doubled from
fifty-one to a hundred and four, and the first covid-19-related death in the country was reported. Within
thirty-six hours, five more Koreans died from the virus, and the number of
infections grew to more than six hundred.
Opposition leaders are
vowing to make President Moon Jae-in’s response to the coronavirus a central
issue of the upcoming midterm-election campaign.Photograph from South Korean Presidential Blue
House / Getty
On February 23rd, Moon
finally raised the coronavirus alert to the highest
level and declared a voluntary lockdown of affected cities and
provinces, but the virus had already spread across the entire country. In a
speech, Moon blamed the outbreak in South Korea on members of Shincheonji
Church of Jesus, a religious group widely considered to be a cult, whose
adherents make up more than half of those infected with covid-19. “The before and after
situations of the group infection among the Shincheonji followers, which is
occurring at a huge scale, presents completely different circumstances,” Moon
said. In January, the group had held several large services in Daegu, South
Korea’s fourth-largest city. Attendees included members who had recently
visited the group’s branch in Wuhan, China, and the virus appears to have
spread among participants.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
Three years after Moon
campaigned on a promise of governing more effectively during an emergency than
Park, the incumbent’s response to one has resembled that of his predecessor.
After the ferry disaster, Park blamed the tragedy on the ship’s owner, a
founder of a different religious group also considered a cult. After the Park
administration issued an arrest warrant for the ferry owner, he went into
hiding. Eventually, he was found dead, an apparent suicide. On March 1st, the
city of Seoul, whose mayor, like Moon, is a member of the Democratic Party,
asked prosecutors to charge Lee Man-hee, the founder of the Shincheonji Church,
and the religious group’s other leaders for murder for their alleged role in
spreading covid-19. That
afternoon, Lee held a press conference, got down on his knees, bowed twice,
and apologized for the group’s role in
the outbreak, which he said was accidental.
The city of Daegu’s 2.4 million residents now
live under quarantine. Across the country, schools have been on break and were
due to restart this week, but the government ordered them to be closed for an
additional three weeks. When Lee Chang-min, a forty-year-old junior-high math
teacher in Daegu, saw that his eight-year-old daughter had a fever, he drove
her to a screening site. When they arrived, they waited in a long line of cars
and were handed a test kit through a window. After his daughter completed the
test, Lee drove home. It was his family’s only trip outside their home since
the quarantine began on February 18th.
Six hours later, the
results arrived via text. (His daughter tested negative.) It was all very
efficient and orderly, Lee told me, as was ordering groceries and household
items online and communicating with friends via text. Lee said that he feared
for the safety of his daughter, his six-year-old son, and his students. “Every
day, I see the rising numbers of the infected, I get anxious, and, especially
as a teacher, I worry about my kids, and I text my students to keep them calm,”
he told me. “But not being able to go outside is the hardest thing.” Lee added
that he worried about his parents, who live outside Daegu near a U.S. military
base, Camp Caroll, where a twenty-three-year-old soldier recently tested
positive for the virus.
In April, Moon faces
midterm elections in which the Democratic Party hopes to retain its majority in
parliament. Opposition leaders are
vowing to make the president’s response a central issue of the campaign. “This
government missed the golden time,” Representative Ha, the conservative
National Assembly member, told me, referring to the early days of the crisis.
“They should have banned the Chinese entry and been more alert at the first
sign of the outbreak.” Citing the number of covid-19 diagnoses in South Korea, ninety-five countries,
including China and Japan, now ban or limit entry by South Korean nationals.
Even before the
outbreak, Moon’s once overwhelming popularity had dropped significantly over
the past year, and he had struggled to deliver one of his central goals: peace
with North Korea. On Monday, adding to Moon’s political problems, North Korea
launched two missiles for the first time this year. To achieve a breakthrough
with Pyongyang, Moon needs the support of China, North Korea’s most important
economic and political backer. Yet Moon’s deference to China, which he
displayed over and over regarding coronavirus, is a political liability among
South Koreans, who resent what they see as Beijing’s long history of meddling
in their affairs. Dr. Choi, of the K.M.A, which has called for a ban on
travellers from China six times, said that public health should be prioritized
over relations with China. “We have been questioning the government about why
it is that public health isn’t the priority in a crisis about public health,” he
said.
Six weeks after the
outbreak began, nearly 1.5 million Koreans have signed a petition demanding
Moon’s impeachment. During the impeachment of President Park, questions
lingered over her whereabouts in the hours after the ferry’s sinking. There is
no mystery regarding what President Moon was doing when the first covid-19-related death occurred: he was
partying with celebrities over chapaguri.
Suki
Kim is an investigative journalist and a novelist. Her last
book was “Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North
Korea’s Elite
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