Covid-19: in Korea, telephone data used to locate a new outbreak

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On the teeth after the discovery of a new focus of infection with Covid-19 after an infected person went to several clubs in a night district of Seoul, the South Korean authorities have deployed considerable resources. To find and test all the revelers, the authorities asked the operators for help.

Publicity

With our correspondent in Seoul, Frédéric Ojardias

The three South Korean telephone operators have given authorities a full list of all those whose phones - turned on - were in the nightlife district of Itaewon between April 24 and May 5. It is in this district of Seoul that a contaminated person created a new center of contaminations after several days without new cases in the country. Since then, 119 contaminations linked to these clubs have already been identified.

Invasion of privacy

In total, there are 10,905 people, whose name and number have been sent to the Ministry of Health. A measure of last resort: some Itaewon nightclubs are frequented by the homosexual community and hundreds of clients have not been screened for fear of revealing their sexual orientation and of being stigmatized, the LGBT community being the victim of severe discrimination in South Korea.

But these people in hiding are potentially carriers of the virus and the authorities are therefore trying by all means to contact them. They have already assured that their anonymity would be respected. They have provided fines for those who refuse to attend.

A measure used for the fourth time since the start of the epidemic

And they therefore obtained from the operators the list of all the phones present for more than thirty minutes around the seventeen terminals covering the Ittaewon clubs affected by the infection.

Since the Middle East respiratory syndrome crisis in 2015 (MERS-CoV), South Korean law has authorized this invasion of privacy in the event of a major health emergency. It is the fourth time since the start of the crisis that the South Korean government has been forced to use such a tool, but it is the first time that it has done so for such a long period.

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• South Korea
• Coronavirus
• Health and Medicine
• Telecom

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