Korea COVID Travel BlogSo as I said when you arrive at the airport you are made to install the “self-quarantine safety protection” App on your phones. The app is the registered to you, and your application to enter the country, which will only be approved after your successful completion of the 2 week quarantine period and 2 negative COVID tests.
The app works in 2 ways, firstly using the location data from your home it is tracking you and importantly showing your not going anywhere! I had one case where the app did tell me my phone “hadn’t moved enough” not sure what that was about as surely that was a good thing! Restarting my phone cured this issue.
You also have to enter a self diagnosis of symptoms and take a temperature reading (using my thermometer given to my after my first COVID test). You have to do this before around 11 each morning and again before 8pm at night. I tend to do it when I get up at 9am and again before dinner at around 6pm. Native Koreans use this app if they have been told to self isolate after coming in contact with a confirmed case.
On top of this you also get assigned a local government case worker who contact me via the Korean messaging app KaKaoTalk. At the beginning I got a voice call twice a day and a video call once a day to confirm I was in the building. I managed to miss 2 of these because I was firstly asleep and secondly my wifi for some reason turned off on my phone (which probably also stopped the app reporting my location). This was chased up to our Korean contact who made sure I got back in touch. My case worker is a lovely Korean lady! I’ve seen her children in the background of video calls to check on my apartment and they are cute and interested in what’s going on!
The government (including my case worker) have turned up on several occasions to the apartment building and we all have to go out on the balconies to show that we are in the building! I’ve waved at her to say hello!
There have been some security issues with the app which the government admit is due to the apps hasty roll out. But these have been corrected with updates as soon as the Korean Government were aware of them. Either way certainly be deleting the app once i’ve entered Korea next week!
So it’s all a bit strange, but great to see a government taking this crisis seriously and actually building and using effective digital tools to help combat and control the virus. There has been widespread praise for how effective these have been.
Although surely it’s not as a good as our UK “world-beating” track and trace app…
