Korea managed to maintain its daily Covid-19 tally under 2,000 for the second consecutive day on Tuesday. However, health authorities remained cautious, predicting a possible resurge after a week tied to relaxed restrictions and the Halloween holiday.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) reported 1,589 new virus cases, including 1,578 local infections, raising the cumulative caseload to 367,974 as of midnight Tuesday.
Sixteen more people died from the virus, raising the death toll to 2,874 with a fatality rate of 0.78 percent.
On Monday, most office workers and students resumed their pre-pandemic lives as the government shifted to the "living with Covid" system to bring the nation back to normalcy gradually. Korea activated the first of the three-stage scheme to gradually phase out coronavirus restrictions as more than 70 percent of the population has completed vaccination.
Under the latest measure effective for four weeks, restrictions on business hours of cafes, restaurants, and other businesses were fully lifted, except for nightlife establishments, and the private gathering limit was raised to 10 people for the greater Seoul area.
High-risk facilities, such as bars and nightclubs, are required to introduce the "vaccine pass" system under which visitors have to show that they have been fully vaccinated or have a negative test result.
Working from home, recommended for 30 percent of the workforce at companies outside the manufacturing sector under the previous Level 4 social distancing in the greater Seoul area, is no longer advised. The Education Ministry will also allow schools to fully open to students on Nov. 22, following a state-run university entrance exam a week before.
However, health officials expressed their concerns that the situation may turn worse at any time, predicting that the impact of Halloween weekend last week and the implementation of its phased recovery of daily life would appear with a time lag of one week.
"As there are more gatherings and events in the process of recovering to daily life, new Covid-19 cases are likely to increase," Ministry of Health and Welfare Spokesman Son Young-rae said during a daily press briefing. "Since the Delta variant has become a dominant strain, the incubation period is shorter than that of the original virus.”
Son warned that the possibility of infection among unvaccinated people could increase with the eased quarantine rules.
The effectiveness of preventing infection for vaccinated people is more than 60 percent, and the effect of preventing severe disease or death is more than 90 percent, Son said. Also, the severe morbidity-mortality rate among fully vaccinated people is one-tenth of that of the unvaccinated.
The main objective of the eased quarantine rules is to stabilize the medical system, and the number of unvaccinated people is very important, he added. “This is because an increase in the number of confirmed patients from the unvaccinated population can lead to more severe patients and overstretch the nation's intensive care capacity.”
On Tuesday, the government announced that it is considering a plan to present the number of confirmed cases as an average accumulated over seven days under the new quarantine system.
"The difference between each day of the week is so large that it seems appropriate to present the figure as an average of seven days if possible," Son said.
Korea has vaccinated 41,224,561 people – 11,107,555 with the AstraZeneca vaccine, 21,992,817 with Pfizer's vaccine, 1,485,380 with Janssen's vaccine, 6,556,062 with Moderna's vaccine – with the first shot of the vaccine up 82,747 from the previous day.
As of Monday, 75.6 percent of Koreans were fully vaccinated, while 80.3 percent have received their first shots.