Starting from November, Korea will fully resume its visa-waiver program, after suspending it in early 2020 to prevent Covid-19 from spreading.
The visa-free system allows entry into the country for tourism, visiting relatives, field trips, inspections, and short-term business without a visa.
Korea had temporarily suspended visa-free entry from April 13, 2020, for 91 countries that have banned the entry of Koreans in accordance with the prevention of overseas inflow of Covid-19.
While the visa-waiver program had resumed for most countries, eight countries -- Japan, Taiwan, Macau, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Micronesia, Samoa, and Tonga – had maintained the visa-waiver suspension for Koreans.
However, with Japan, Taiwan, Macau, and five Pacific Island countries resuming visa-free entry for Koreans recently, the government has decided to allow visa-free entry for the eight countries from Nov. 1.
Japan has been allowing Koreans to enter the country through the visa-waiver program since Oct. 11 and Taiwan since the end of September. The five Pacific island countries have also resumed visa-free entry for Korean nationals, allowing visa-free entry.
Meanwhile, Health and Welfare Minister Cho Kyoo-hong said he would consider applying the mask-wearing obligation only in certain places, such as public transportation and hospitals.
“The ministry will review overseas cases where mask mandate is enforced in select places such as medical institutions, public transportation, and social welfare facilities and consider applying a similar measure in Korea," Cho said during a parliamentary audit of the National Assembly Health and Welfare Committee on Thursday.
Cho’s comment follows a remark by Rep. Kim Mi-ae of the People Power Party during the parliamentary audit that the duty to wear a mask should be selectively applied.
Rep. Kim criticized imposing the mask mandate on all indoor facilities, saying the policy favors the government only, and there is great public concern about language and social development problems of infants and young children due to wearing face masks.
Cho agreed with Rep. Kim’s comments but said the mask mandate was decided after hearing the opinions of experts in consideration of a possible resurgence of the Covid-19 virus.
“The Ministry of Health and Welfare believes that the response to the most recent viral wave of the Covid-19 pandemic is an example of a successful quarantine while reducing the burden of daily life,” Cho added.
Mathematicians have given various forecasts of Covid-19 cases per day in predicting the number of new cases for the next two weeks.
A team at the National Institute for Mathematical Science (NIMS) predicted the least number of daily Covid-19 cases by predicting that the number of new confirmed Covid-19 cases per day will drop to 13,000 in two weeks.
The team concluded so after considering the amount of movement of citizens aggregated from KT mobile communication location data, and the cumulative number of confirmed cases by province from Oct. 5 to Wednesday.
In contrast, a team led by Professor Jeong Il-hyo of the Department of Mathematics at Pusan National University predicted that the number of confirmed cases would increase in two weeks.
The team said that the number of new confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Korea will rise to 28,268 from Oct. 26 to Nov. 1, after hovering around 25,693 from Wednesday to next Tuesday.
The research team made such predictions after considering that the average daily average number of local infections from the second week of October (Oct. 12 to Oct. 18) increased by 3,662 from the previous week.
On Thursday, Korea added 25,431 new Covid-19 infections, including 53 cases from abroad, bringing the total caseload to 25,219,546, according to the KDCA.
The nation also reported 23 more Covid-19 deaths, raising the death toll to 28,922. The fatality rate stood at 0.11 percent. The number of critically ill patients came to 239, up six from the previous day.
According to the KDCA, about 44.68 million among 52 million Koreans have been fully vaccinated. In addition, about 33.63 million people had received their first booster shots, and 7.5 million had their second booster shots.