Number of COVID-19 cases in S. Korea exceeds 2,000

코로나19 발생 39일만에 확진자 2천명 넘어서

South Korea is seeing a surge in coronavirus cases, now at more than 2-thousand.
With the latest, our Lee Kyung-eun is on the line.
So, Kyung-eun,... the health authorities confirmed hundreds more infections today.
That's right. South Korea confirmed 4-hundred-27 more cases on Friday.
This brings the total number of cases in the country to 2-thousand-22.
The figure has nearly doubled in just over three days.
And that two-thousand mark has been surpassed just 39 days since South Korea confirmed its first case on January 20th.
More than 80 percent of the new cases are in the southeastern city of Daegu and the surrounding Gyeongsangbuk-do Province.
Daegu alone has more than one thousand-three hundred cases.
Also, the 50th Infantry Division of the South Korean army in Daegu is under lock-down or the so-called "cohort quarantine",...after one of its trainees was found to be a member of the religious group Shincheonji.
That group has been the source of the massive rise in cases in the past couple of days.
It is unclear whether the trainee is infected.
But he has been quarantined in hospital and is waiting for his test result.
Some 15 other trainees who have shared the building with the man are quarantined in individual rooms.
As of Friday afternoon, the death toll stands at 13, the same as yesterday.
On Thursday, a 74-year-old man from Daegu was confirmed dead. He was a member of the Shincheonji religious group.

So the major clusters are cases are coming from Daegu, and many are linked to the religious group Shincheonji.
How is the government dealing with the rapid spread in that community?
The Korean government is tracking down all of Shincheonji's followers.
It has obtained the complete list of the group's roughly 3-hundred-10-thousand members.
This includes an additional list of some 60-thousand people considered to be in the group's initiation process.
The government has identified one-third of those members, among whom,...some one-thousand-six-hundred people are found to have symptoms and are currently under self-quarantine.
Another one-thousand-two-hundred are waiting for their test results.
As you said, many cases are coming from this particular religious group.
Those cases began with the country's 31st patient, a Shincheonji follower, who was confirmed to have the virus in Daegu on February 18th.
Since then, the number of confirmed cases in the country has skyrocketed.
The 61-year old woman attended Shincheonji services twice in the ten days before she was confirmed to be infected.

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