South Korea's daily infection hit 600K. That is equivalent of 4 MM infections in the US, for comparison.
"BA.2’s reproductive number — how many other people each infected person goes on to infect on average — is around 10. With stringent public health measures like social distancing, frequent testing, and quarantining, the reproductive number dropped to 2 or 3, “which is a very substantial reduction, but not enough to prevent an outbreak from occurring,”"
https://www.vox.com/22977354/covid-19-outbreak-omicron-ba2-hong-kong-south-korea-china-asia-vaccine
“Almost all of the severe cases and deaths have occurred in unvaccinated people, so it doesn’t seem that declining immunity is playing a major role,”
It was a misstep by the South Korean Public Health Agency to remove restrictions before Omicron had reached its peak infection of the public.
- Health officials have recently significantly eased quarantine restrictions and border controls and stopped requiring adults to show proof of vaccination or negative tests when entering potentially crowded spaces like restaurants so that more public and health workers could respond to rapidly expanding at-home treatments.
Simply, on the surface, it looks like South Korea said "fuck those that are not vaccinated" considering they now represent a small percentage of the population and the government saw some early data about the mild infections by Omicron.
- Infections and hospitalizations were probably worsened by an intense presidential campaign leading up to last week's election, which also appeared to have reduced political capacity to maintain a stringent virus response.

The good news is that the growth rate of infections has slowed down due to the effectiveness of oral antiviral treatments,” such as Pfizer's Paxlovid pills.
The highly transmissible Omicron subvariant known as BA.2 also seems to be driving up infections. About 26% of the country's recent cases have been linked to BA.2, up from around 17% last month.
Yet, I notice something odd about the increasing numbers in South Korea. One data source states it's mainly in the not vaccinated population while at the same it's in the "older population".
Strangely, the older population is the most protected population in South Korea by vaccination. Thus, considering the not vaccinated population is so small...South Korea should soon see a dramatic drop in their Covid numbers as Omicron burns through the not vaccinated population.
wrbtrader