비어가는 병상...인천•울산 등 12곳 전담병원 지정 해제
After battling the coronavirus outbreak for months,... since the first patient was reported in South Korea exactly one-hundred days ago,... the country has made astonishing progress,... especially compared to a number of other places around the world.
Local health authorities are now converting infectious disease wards back to regular hospitals as more patients are being discharged from hospitals after making full recoveries.
Kim Hyo-sun reports.
Hospital beds and medical equipment are piled up in a lobby at a hospital in Seoul.
They are left in the corridor to secure enough space to treat COVID-19 patients after the hospital was named a designated hospital for infectious diseases on February 20th.
In mid-March, nearly 80 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized here,... but now the number is more like 40.
"We are seeing a drop off in the number of inpatients. We hope the outbreak comes to an end."
As the nation sees a dwindling number on newly confirmed cases,... the South Korean government has started to reduce the number of hospitals specially designated to treat COVID-19.
Some 67 hospitals and 75-hundred beds nationwide were designated at the outset.
Of them,... a dozen hospitals with no COVID-19 patients were removed from the list last Thursday.
Health authorities say they will be monitoring the trend of the outbreak before finalizing their decision for Daegu, the epicenter of the virus in South Korea, as well as the metropolitan area where sporadic infections are still being reported.
"Patients with other ailments are being treated at other hospitals. In some places, designated hospitals are the only hospitals in the area."
The authorities will also begin to reduce the number of so-called life treatment centers, which were set up to treat COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms,... as the number of people under treatment is expected to drop to around 1-thousand in the near future if there are no further cluster infections.
However, the authorities add that treatment centers for inbound travelers will be kept at 3-hundred rooms.
Kim Hyo-sun, Arirang News.
