• South Korea ramps up restrictions as cases in India reach 2.5M,
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea on Saturday announced stronger social distancing restrictions for its greater capital area, where a surge in COVID-19 cases has threatened to erase the nation’s hard-won gains against the virus.
The two-week measures starting Sunday will allow authorities in Seoul and towns in neighboring Gyeonggi Province to shut down high-risk facilities such as nightclubs, karaoke rooms, movie theaters and buffet restaurants if they fail to properly enforce preventative measures, including social distancing, temperature checks, keeping customer lists to allow for contact tracing and requiring masks.
Fans will once again be banned from professional baseball and soccer, just a few weeks after health authorities allowed teams to let in spectators for a portion of their seats in each game.
Gatherings of more than 50 people will be discouraged. Churches will be advised to shift their services online.
Health Minister Park Neung-hoo revealed the measures hours after the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 166 newly confirmed cases — the highest daily jump in five months.
Mr. Park expressed concern transmissions are getting out of control in Seoul, where health authorities have found it increasingly difficult to track infection routes.
“The current situation looks like an early stage of a massive round of transmissions,” he said. “If we fail to properly control the spread now, a broader and quicker spread of the virus would spike the number of patients and reach nationwide.”
Officials have previously resisted calls to enforce stronger distancing measures, citing concerns for the fragile economy policymakers say could possibly shrink for the first time in two decades.
South Korea’s caseload is now at 15,039, including 305 deaths.
The KCDC said 155 of the new infections were local, mostly from the densely populated Seoul area, where authorities scurried to shut down thousands of churches.
Many of them had failed to properly enforce preventative measures, allowing worshippers to take off their masks, sing in choirs or eat together in diners.
Other clusters have been tied to nursing homes, schools, restaurants, outdoor markets and door-todoor salespeople.
Officials also worried about demonstrations by thousands of anti-government protesters in Seoul on Saturday, the 75th anniversary of the country’s liberation from Japanese rule at the end of World War II.
India crosses 2.5M confirmed case mark
India’s confirmed coronavirus cases have crossed 2.5 million with another biggest single-day spike of 65,002 in the past 24 hours. India is behind only the U.S. and Brazil in the number of total cases.
The Health Ministry on Saturday also reported another 996 deaths for a total of 49,036. The average daily reported cases jumped from around 15,000 in the first week of July to more than 50,000 at the beginning of August.
The Health Ministry said the rise shows the extent of testing with 800,000 carried out in a single day. But experts say India needs to pursue testing more vigorously.
India’s two-month lockdown imposed nationwide in late March kept infections low, but it has eased and is now largely being enforced in high-risk areas. The new cases spiked after India reopened shops and manufacturing and allowed hundreds of thousands of migrant workers to return to their homes from hard-hit regions.
China reports 22 cases
China’s government reported 22 new confirmed coronavirus cases Saturday.
Eight were acquired locally, including seven in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, the National Health Commission reported. The rest were found in travelers who arrived from abroad.
The new cases raised the number of confirmed cases on China’s mainland — where the pandemic began in December — to 84,808, with 4,634 deaths.