"A Rare Case Even Globally" The Authorities' Perspective on Shincheonji

On the afternoon of the 5th, Shincheonji officials blocked the press from entering the headquarters of the Shincheonji Church in Gwacheon-si, Gyeonggi Province, where the government is conducting an administrative investigation. The Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters announced that from 11 a.m. that day, they were conducting an administrative investigation of the church headquarters to collect information on domestic and international Shincheonji believers and trainees.

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On the 5th, Kwon Jun-wook, Deputy Director of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasure Headquarters leading the COVID-19 response, said this during a briefing, referring to the Shincheonji Daegu Church where a 'super-spreader' event occurred.

According to the quarantine headquarters, as of this day, the total confirmed cases in South Korea are 5,766. Among them, 4,327 cases are from the Daegu area, and 3,013 of those are related to Shincheonji. This means they are either members of the Shincheonji Daegu Church or their family and acquaintances who were infected through contact. Since epidemiological investigations are ongoing, this number may increase depending on the results.

It is quite unusual that more than half of the cases emerged through a single facility in a specific region about a month and a half after the first domestic case was reported. After identifying patient number 31, who was a Shincheonji member, the authorities recognized that the religious gatherings involved "enclosed spaces with many people densely packed." However, there was a clear sense that they did not anticipate such a large number of cases.

Cluster infections have always occurred when new infectious diseases emerge. Compared to Shincheonji, the numbers were significantly lower. In the early stages of the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, about 20 people were infected at a language academy in the Seoul metropolitan area, and during the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak in South Korea, hospital-acquired infections involved only dozens of cases.

Although the H1N1 influenza spread nationwide, reaching up to 700,000 cases, it was not a cluster outbreak centered on a specific facility. Similarly, for COVID-19, sporadic cluster infections have been reported outside of Shincheonji, such as at Cheongdo Daenam Hospital, sports facilities in Cheonan, and an Israeli pilgrimage, but the likelihood of another large-scale outbreak like Shincheonji is expected to be low.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.