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Schools reopen in S Korea amid signs MERS threat is receding

SEOUL — Thousands of South Korean schools that were shut to prevent the spread of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) yesterday reopened, as the country sought to return to normal nearly four weeks into an outbreak that showed signs of slowing.

A health worker conducting temperature checks on children at schools that reopened yesterday. Photo: AP

A health worker conducting temperature checks on children at schools that reopened yesterday. Photo: AP

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SEOUL — Thousands of South Korean schools that were shut to prevent the spread of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) yesterday reopened, as the country sought to return to normal nearly four weeks into an outbreak that showed signs of slowing.

Five new cases were reported by the Health Ministry yesterday, taking the total to 150, the largest outbreak outside of Saudi Arabia. The ministry also said another patient infected with the MERS virus had become the 16th fatality.

But the number of new cases was sharply lower than daily rises that reached as high as 23 last week.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Saturday said the decline suggested that control measures were working.

At least 440 schools remained closed, compared with the 2,900 that were shut on Friday.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye, whose approval rating has taken a battering because of the government’s response to MERS, urged people to return to normal.

“I ask the business community, too, to continue to go on with investment, production and management activities as normal and particularly help with ensuring that consumers don’t hold back from spending money,” she told senior aides.

The Health Ministry said it would quarantine or put under observation about 4,000 people who might have been exposed to MERS at a prominent Seoul hospital, the Samsung Medical Centre, which has suspended most services.

But many in that group are among the 5,216 already under quarantine, most of them at home and some in hospitals.

The Samsung Medical Centre said on Sunday that it was suspending all non-emergency surgery and would take no new patients, after more than 70 cases were traced to the hospital, including a worker who was found to have been in contact with more than 200 people.

At Myoungin Elementary School in the city of Suwon, south of Seoul, teachers greeted students at the gate for the first time in 10 days, taking temperatures and sending home anyone with a fever.

The WHO last week recommended that schools be reopened, saying they have not been linked to transmission of the virus in South Korea or elsewhere.

“The child’s mother and I both work, so I think it’s better for kids to be in school, where there can be proper measures, rather than keeping them home,” said Ms Bin Ko-ok, who took her first-grader grandchild to school.

Deputy Prime Minister Choi Kyung-hwan told Parliament that the next two days would be a watershed period for the outbreak, as the two-week incubation period for the initial wave of cases traced to the Samsung Medical Centre comes to an end.

Mr Choi, who is also Finance Minister, said the government was considering a possible supplementary budget to bolster the economy, which is Asia’s fourth-biggest.

“The government is doing all it can to quickly contain the outbreak,” said Mr Choi. “There is a need to guard against excessive anxiety and limit the economic fallout.”

South Korea said more than 110,000 group tourists had called off visits since the start of the outbreak, and forecast that from this month through August, 820,000 fewer people would visit the country, at a cost of US$900 million (S$1.21 billion) in lost potential revenue.

The trend is expected to continue through the next few months, the Culture Ministry said. Chinese airlines were cutting back flights to South Korea, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

As people avoided stores, South Korea’s largest hypermarket chain, E-mart, said online sales between June 1 and 11 rose 63 per cent year-on-year, while Homeplus, the second-largest chain, saw online sales between June 1 and 14 rise 50 per cent.

First identified in humans in 2012, MERS is caused by a coronavirus from the same family as the one that triggered China’s deadly outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in 2003. There is no cure or vaccine.

A hospital in Daejeon, 140km south of Seoul, stopped taking all new patients yesterday as a precaution, after one of its nurses was diagnosed with MERS.

It is the fifth hospital to have shut down completely or in part.

All of the cases in what the WHO called a “large and complex” outbreak have been traced to healthcare facilities. AGENCIES

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