COVID-19 summer wave passes peak in South Korea

Seoul, Aug 28: This year's summer wave of COVID-19 is estimated to have passed its peak, with the weekly number of the virus' inpatients dropping 20 per cent last week, South Korean health authorities said on Wednesday.

The number of COVID-19 patients at 220 hospitals last week reached 1,164, compared with 1,464 reported a week earlier, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said in a statement, Yonhap news agency reported.

"Taking into consideration a recent trend of outbreaks and last year's summer wave, we believe that this year's summer wave has peaked," the KDCA said.

The latest tally also compares with 1,366 patients in the second week of this month, which shot up 55.2 per cent from a week earlier.

Still, KDCA Commissioner Jee Young-mee urged people to remain vigilant as the virus could spread around the start of the new semester and the Chuseok holiday in September.

The Chuseok fall harvest holiday runs from September 14-18.

Jee also noted that South Korea plans to start inoculation programmes with vaccines effective against recent variants, such as JN.1, in October, which also work against KP.3, the current dominant variant.

Seoul had already witnessed 36 tropical nights this summer, including 33 days in a row. This is the most in frequency since modern meteorological monitoring was started in the nation's capital in 1907, a record of well over a century had been broken, which led to devastating consequences coupled with a nightmare that seemed never to end.

When the temperature stays at or above 25 degrees Celsius from 6.01 p.m. to 9 a.m. the next day, it's called a tropical night.

The ongoing convergence of the North Pacific and Tibetan high-pressure systems over the Korean peninsula could have been much worse but the nightmare has passed, at least for now.