I'm an Australian but have been living in South Korea the past decade or so. Can't believe how similar the situations are politically.
The Delta strain recently started to explode (like last week). Korea has never really had a full lock down but what they do enforce is shutdowns of businesses in entertainment and restaurants by 10pm, and other restrictions like only 20% of buses will run past 10pm etc.. Also, people are not allowed to meet in groups of more than 4. Around two weeks ago, the government announced that it will do away with these restrictions from July onwards. Then BOOM, cases explode. Daily cases were down to 300ish now it's above 1300 and looks like we are headed to 2000 daily cases. Even at its worst last year, it was barely 1000.
So what's the go? They announced last week that from tomorrow (Monday 12th July) from 6pm onwards, noone is allowed to meet in groups of more than 2, plus a bunch of other restrictions. So basically, the government was enticing people to go crazy over the weekend and party before restrictions hit... How does that make sense? Why not have the restrictions go in effect immediately? Cases have only increased exponentially over the past 3 to 4 days.
Furthermore, the news is all over people in their twenties and thirties. Anything related to COVID is blamed on that demographic but statistically, its the people who are in their forties and fifties who have the highest number of cases. Also, any rally that is antigovernmental is heavily condemned, even labelled 'murderous' by news outlets while progovernment rallies are not covered by the news at all. Even when a progovernment rally had over 13,000 people attend and had 82 positive cases come out from that rally, it wasn't on the news.
Left and Right isn't as pronounced as the US but it has a heavy presence. The government at the moment aren't getting many votes from places like Daegu (traditionally conservative) and from people in the twenties and thirties among other demographics. Guess which demographics are targeted all over the news for basically all things negative COVID wise....
In Korea, vaccines are rolled out in order of oldest to youngest (for regular people). So people in their 90s, 80s, 70s and 60s have been fully or partially vaccinated. However, the rest of us don't even know when we can get our first shot. Why hasn't the government acquired more vaccines? Government has never apologized for the lack of vaccines but still go on about how effective the 'K-Measures' (Korea puts K in front of everything they want to market, K-pop, K-cosmetics, K-food etc.), even the Presidents keeps mentioning 'K-Measures' over and over again.
The government needs to get more vaccines. Stop making excuses and going on and on about last year's successful measures and fix this already. Rant over.
