S. Korean government’s homecare guidelines keep changing

New homecare guidelines for COVID-19 patients will be applied from Thursday. Only a group of patients who require more medical attention, such as those over 60, will receive health monitoring twice a day and others will be under homecare. The disease control authorities, which announced a change in homecare guidelines on Monday, changed the scope of patients to be under intensive care the day before the new guidelines’ implementation.

The Central Disaster Management Headquarters announced on Wednesday that those aged over 60 or the ones who require intensive care among the patients who were prescribed oral medicines are considered to be the intensive care group. Patients in their 50s with pre-existing conditions were removed from the group. “Those who take medicines for high blood pressure or diabetes don’t have many issues in daily life so we decided to exclude them from the intensive care group,” said Choi Jong-gyun, the head of homecare at the Central Disaster Management Headquarters.

The number of new daily patients hit a new record of 49,567 as of 12 a.m. on Wednesday, up 13,000 patients from the previous day. The team led by Professor Jung Jae-hoon of the department of preventive medicine at Gachon University predicted that the number of new patients would exceed 200,000 per day for about a month from the beginning of March. At the peak of infections, it is estimated to reach over 240,000. “As the government practically gave up on ‘3T disease prevention,’ which consists of testing, tracking, and treatment, the speed of infection may be accelerated,” said Professor Jung. There is a concern that the number of patients captured in statistics will be lower than the actual number as those aged below 60 will receive rapid antigen tests.

Meanwhile, the Central Disease Control Headquarters announced that the Omicron variant’s fatality rate is 0.21 percent. It is still one-third of the Delta variant but slightly higher than 0.16 percent, which was announced on January 24.


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