Media Appearance: Cults and Conservatives Spread Coronavirus in South Korea on Foreign Policy

South Korean media picked up this article, and its translation was one of the most read stories on daum.net for several days:

Since the discovery of Patient Number 31, the number of COVID-19 cases in South Korea jumped from 30 to 977 in eight days. Nearly all of the new cases are Shincheonji cultists, or traceable to them. Particularly tragic is the case of Cheongdo Daenam Hospital, where the funeral for Lee Man-hee’s brother was held. This hospital alone saw 113 cases, most of whom were patients in the psychiatric who were committed long term. Because these patients never left the hospital much less traveled abroad, they were not tested early for nCoV, nor were they properly quarantined. This led to an advanced stage of the disease among many of the psychiatric patients, resulting in seven out of the ten coronavirus deaths thus far.

South Korea’s politics, meanwhile, is presenting another type of retrograde challenge. South Korea’s conservatives, still recovering from the impeachment and removal of the conservative president Park Geun-hye in 2017, have held large scale rallies in the middle of Seoul each week for months. Even as large corporations are advising the employees to work remotely and people are cancelling meetings, these conservative groups—largely made up of high-risk, geriatric population—continue to hold rallies, cavalierly ignoring the Seoul government’s advisory to the contrary. Shouting down Seoul mayor Park Won-soon’s plea to stop the rally, the conservative group leader and pastor Jeon Gwang-hun implausibly claimed it was impossible to contract coronavirus outdoors, while those attending claimed “God was making the wind blow to drive out the virus.” 

Cults and Conservatives Spread Coronavirus in South Korea [Foreign Policy]