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| Children without masks play at a childcare center in Gwangju, Jan. 30, as the government lifted most mandatory indoor mask-wearing rules. Yonhap |
By Jun Ji-hye
Childcare centers and private tutoring academies are getting closer to a return to pre-pandemic normality, as most COVID-19 restrictions have been lifted in Korea including the mask mandate on public transportation amid an overall downtrend in infections.
According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, Tuesday, COVID-19 guidelines for childcare centers were eased starting Monday, with the temperature check requirement abolished.
Before the eased guidelines were applied, childcare centers had been required to check the temperature of teachers, infants and toddlers more than twice a day. The eased guidelines call for temperature checks to be carried out when a childcare center has any confirmed cases.
Childcare centers had also been advised to install partition boards at canteens. This has been changed and is now up to each center, with the guideline of "safe distance" at canteens abolished.
The mask guideline for teachers has been changed. Teachers had to continue to wear face masks even after the government lifted most of the mandatory indoor mask-wearing rules on Jan. 30. But under the eased guidelines, they are advised to wear masks only on certain occasions, such as if they have symptoms associated with COVID-19 and if they were in close contact with virus patients.
The requirement for hourly ventilation was changed to every two hours.
Similarly, most private extracurricular education businesses, which sometimes applied harsher COVID-19 restrictions than those applied by government schools to prevent infections on their premises, have recently eased their own restrictions.
Officials from such enterprises said they decided to ease restrictions, reflecting the government's recent decision to end the mask mandate on public transportation. Student pick-up-drop-off vehicles were categorized as "public transportation," thus the mask mandate remained in place there until the government ended it.
"We maintained the mask mandate in classrooms even after the mask-wearing requirements were adjusted on Jan. 30. But we recently changed the mandate to a recommendation, leaving it to the decision of each student," an official from Megastudy, one of the major private education institutes, said.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said the COVID-19 situation has maintained a downtrend in recent weeks.
According to the KDCA data, the number of daily confirmed COVID-19 cases on average reported between Feb. 5 and Feb. 11 stood at 13,550.
The figure decreased to 9,361 between Feb. 26 and March 4, and to 9,300 between March 12 and March 18.
Health authorities did not rule out the possibility of an increase in infections following the lifting of the mask mandate on public transportation. But they noted that it would only be temporary and not bring about another pandemic wave.
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