South Korea, China resume limited flights amid virus

ANKARA

South Korea and China on Thursday resumed limited flights amid coronavirus concerns.

The Transport Ministry of South Korea, which is facing a resurgence of COVID-19 cases, said the flights will give Koreans access to China again, Kyodo News Agency reported.

The pandemic has hit the aviation sector hard, cutting the number of flights to China from South Korea from 1,164 during winter 2019 to just 21 a week this August.

The number of routes was reduced from 84 to just 16.

Strict measures have been taken by many countries to stem the spread of the deadly infection which has spread to 188 countries, regions, and territories, infecting close to 30 million people. So far, 938,000 people have died due to COVID-19.

According to Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, South Korea is facing a new crisis where the transmission sources of the infection remain untraced.

Such cases reached a record high of 26.4% of the total 2,013 new infections recorded over the past two weeks. Over 532 cases were those infections having “unknown transmission routes.”

“The situation means that asymptomatic patients or people with mild symptoms can spread the virus additionally,” said Jeong Eun-kyeong, director at the agency. “It also indicates that health authorities face difficulties in carrying out contact tracing thoroughly.”

He said they are not using rapid COVID-19 test kits “for the final diagnosis of the virus due to accuracy problems.”

South Korea reported 153 new coronavirus cases, including 145 local infections.

The country has a total caseload of 22,657, while 2.2 million coronavirus tests have been done since Jan. 3. The death toll climbed to 372 after five more patients lost their lives to the coronavirus.