Have not posted in a long time in this thread. South Korea is getting it's ass kicked by Omicron right now. In December, there was a Delta surge, but it never really got out of control. They still traced everyone. Omicron arrived here just in time for the lunar new year which is a 3 day holiday where everyone goes home to see their families and it fell so that it was a five day weekend. After the holiday, Omicron has just been spreading like crazy. There had been 3000 deaths or so through the end of November, 2021. The Delta surge in December doubled that to around 6k. Omicron has doubled it again at over 13K at this moment. The number of total cases was 1 million at the beginning of February before the holiday. It broke 10 million total cases recently. Daily cases recently topped 400k and 400 deaths.
They stopped contract tracing last month as there were just too many sick people now to trace them all. No more checking in on your phone/sign in sheets and temperature checks to enter businesses. Schools and businesses used to shut down if there was a case. Right now nothing shuts down. Just go home until you are better.
Good news is Korea has nearly a 90% vaccination rate and like 2/3 have been boosted. Throw in universal health care and it helps a lot. Most of the dead are unvaccinated and/or at risk people who are being exposed for the first time, since the near universal mask wearing here and tracing previously helped get previous surges under control quickly.
The worldometers web site has some crazy graphs showing how Omicron has really gone crazy in South Korea compared to how well COVID was handled the first couple years.