Prioritize coronavirus fight

New Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon is pushing ahead with the city’s own quarantine measures, saying the current anti-coronavirus restrictions have failed to address people’s livelihoods. The move comes amid growing complaints from small business owners reeling from financial woes owing to the central government’s uniform social distancing regulations.

Oh, affiliated with the main opposition People Power Party, plans to introduce practical and flexible business hours instead of blanket bans on businesses after 9 p.m. or 10 p.m. regardless of industry. For example, the city is seeking to ease regulations on business hours for entertainment pubs until midnight and for poker pubs until 11 p.m. To dispel concerns about cluster infections, he also proposed the use of rapid self-test kits for coronavirus. Oh reiterated his arguments at a Cabinet meeting chaired by President Moon Jae-in Tuesday, saying, “We need to try new ideas and change our way of thinking.”

In fact, it’s questionable whether the current restrictions are effective in containing the pandemic. Small businesses have long complained of difficulties caused by coronavirus business restrictions, especially since the third wave of infections began late last year. Furthermore, failing to secure enough vaccines casts a dark cloud over the country’s prospects of attaining herd immunity by November as planned.

Nonetheless, this is certainly no time for dangerous experiments, given that new daily infection cases still exceed 500. Most worrisome is that the self-test kits still show low accuracy amid the higher possibility of false negatives. The likelihood is that people who test negative erroneously might feel free to roam around and spread the virus in the Seoul metropolitan area.

Our society should not turn a blind eye to the plight of small businesses resulting from the central government’s inconsistent, ineffective and unfair restrictions. Yet what matters most when it comes to quarantine measures is people’s lives and safety. The central government and the municipality should cooperate to reach scientific conclusions, reflecting expert opinions to the full. There must not be any political considerations in this process.