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| Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun speaks during a daily COVID-19 response meeting in Seoul, Wednesday. Yonhap |
By Kim Se-jeong
The government is seeking to have its drive-thru testing method, which safely sped up testing procedures for COVID-19 here, as an international standard for testing for the respiratory illness.
The health and welfare, and food and drug safety ministries said Wednesday that they would apply to the International Organization for Standardization to get Korea's operational manual for drive-thru testing facilities accepted as a world standard.
The drive-thru testing center allows a possible patient to be questioned, examined and have samples collected while remaining in their car. While the first was deployed at Kyungpook National Medical Center in Daegu, Feb. 23, the central government designated the facility developed by the Goyang City Government in Gyeonggi Province as a Korean standard, March 4.
The drive-thru testing centers immediately drew the world's attention, and journalists, medical experts, diplomats and other countries sent inquiries to the Korean government on the procedural aspects of operating the facilities.
Together with the drive-thru center, the government is also pushing for its operation manuals on non-hospital facilities for the treatment of patients with light symptoms, test kits, walk-thru testing centers, and self-quarantine app to be made international standards.
Fifteen non-hospital facilities normally used as civil servant training centers were used to house 3,025 patients with mild symptoms, drawing positive feedback from infectious disease experts.
To respond to the growing demand for advice on handling COVID-19, the government drafted "K-Quarantine" manuals, explaining how it dealt with the pandemic.
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) reported nine new COVID-19 infections, Monday, pushing up the total number of cases here to 10,761.
Among them, five involved people who had recently returned from overseas. The number of patients under treatment was 1,593, down 61 from the previous day.
Two of the new cases were healthcare workers who returned home after working in Daegu, the epicenter of Korea's COVID-19 outbreak.
The government said Wednesday, 507 confirmed patients are eighteen years or younger, 4.7 percent of the total. Boys accounted for 53.6 percent and those between 13 and 18 years old accounted for 58.3 percent. No deaths have been reported among them.
Separately, the KCDC said the COVID-19 pandemic was causing outbreaks of depression and anxiety among younger members of the population, and the number of cases of child counseling was growing fast.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said almost 380,000 undocumented workers remain vulnerable to the coronavirus, urging the government to address the issue quickly.
In Singapore, migrant workers' residences became infection clusters, raising the alarm here.
The KCDC said no undocumented worker has contracted the virus so far, but it was fully aware of infection risks among them and said it was coming up with measures to prevent them from becoming infected.
