The government decided to extend the 7-day mandatory quarantine for COVID-19 patients until June 20.

Lee Sang-min (minister of the interior and safety), second assistant director of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters, made the announcement in an opening comment during a Headquarters meeting held at the government office in Seoul on the morning of May 20. Lee said, “We decided to postpone the lifting of the mandatory quarantine included in the post-omicron response plan discussed last month for four more weeks until June 20.” He explained, “We will maintain the existing 7-day mandatory quarantine for patients confirmed positive for COVID-19 and reassess the status of the outbreak four weeks later.”

The interior minister further said, “Currently, the (covid) outbreak remains at a scope that can be sufficiently controlled with our medical response capacity, but there are still some concerning factors,” and explained the reasons for maintaining the mandatory quarantine policy. He said, “Last week’s reproduction number increased from the previous week and the decline in the number of patients in critical condition and number of deaths is slowing down.” Last week (May 8-14), the covid reproduction number was 0.90, higher than the 0.72 from the previous week.

The reproduction number (R) is an indicator showing how many people are infected by one patient. The reproduction number was 1.01 in the fourth week of March and had continued to decline after dropping to 0.91 in the last week of March. But last week, the number climbed back up.

Lee said, “A highly contagious new variant has been discovered in South Korea as well, and experts are speaking of a possible immune evasion and the weakening of the vaccine’s effectiveness.” He added, “Thus the government decided to maintain the mandatory quarantine after referring to the opinions of relevant ministries, local governments and overseas cases, based on advice from the expert panel on infectious disease crisis management composed of experts on infectious diseases.”

However, the government also announced that the number of new daily cases of COVID-19 continued to drop since the fourth week of March. Lee said, “Today, we confirmed around 25,000 new cases, which is the lowest number for a Friday in 15 weeks.” He explained, “The average number of daily cases in the past week (May 13-19) was around 27,000, about 24% lower than the previous week (May 6-12).” As of May 20, the number of critical patients in the hospital remained slightly over 200 for two consecutive days, and the occupancy rate of ICU beds has dropped all the way to 16.0%.

The second assistant director said, “We will listen to the opinions of a number of civilian experts until the reassessment and establish a disease control system based on scientific evidence after determining a more specific and reasonable standard for lifting the mandatory quarantine.” The interior minister also said, “We ask the citizens for their kind understanding, since the latest decision was inevitable to smoothly return to our normal medical system and to guard the people’s health.”