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| Quarantine officials disinfect a dormitory for foreign students at Chosun University in Gwangju, Thursday, amid coronavirus fears, ahead of the start of the spring semester next month. /Yonhap |
By Bahk Eun-ji
University campuses here have the potential to become hotbeds for the coronavirus when nearly 70,000 Chinese students return for the spring semester, according to medical experts and university officials, Thursday.
The officials said their campuses cannot be properly quarantined or monitored as the schools are not equipped to manage possible infectious outbreaks, stressing that any infected Chinese nationals could easily give the virus to other students when they come into close contact with one another.
Medical experts said stopping the inflow of possible coronavirus carriers to the universities was the most effective way to contain the virus.
"As long as the number of deaths and confirmed cases keeps rapidly rising in China, the government should block people from the mainland including university students who have yet to come to Korea," said Korean Medical Association (KMA) President Choi Dae-zip.
"In order to solve this COVID-19 crisis, the government has to closely monitor the situation in China, the epicenter of the contagious virus," he said.
As of Thursday, China's National Health Commission reported at least 114 new deaths from the coronavirus outbreak, bringing the number of fatalities to 2,118.
The KMA has been calling on the government to ban Chinese students from entering Korea amid mounting fears that they could bring the virus with them.
Choi said the country already faces the risk of community infections as many of the newly confirmed cases are presumed to be from domestic transmission. In this situation, stopping the inflow of carriers from abroad is ultimately the most effective approach to control the further spread of COVID-19 (2019-nCoV). With this week's surge in the number of infected people, the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced that the virus has begun spreading locally, but with a limited scope.
"We understand China is a major trading partner, and the students' right to be educated is also important. There is a chance to hurt our economy and the relations with educational institutions between the two countries, but we, as doctors, believe nothing is more important than public safety," Choi said.
Infectious disease experts also said restrictions on travelers from China should be implemented, unless stricter monitoring is introduced.
"We can ask Chinese students to submit their medical certificate from the immigration procedure, if the government feels pressure to implement the entry ban immediately," said Prof. Kim Woo-ju of Korea University Guro Hospital.
Kim said that stopping their inflow was the priority to contain the virus, but if the government can't do so for some reasons, then they should closely monitor the health of Chinese students in order to prevent campuses from becoming hotbeds for the virus.
University officials expressed their difficulties in doing this as the schools are not equipped with effective methods of monitoring or controlling possible infections.
According to the Korean Education Statistics Service, the number of Chinese nationals studying in Korea was 69,287 as of April 2019, or 43.3 percent of the 160,165 international students. Among the total number of Chinese students here, 32,590 are enrolled in 17 universities located in Seoul, the data showed.
Although a number of universities in Seoul such as Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Kyunghee, and Chung-Ang have designated separated dormitories to quarantine Chinese students in as instructed by the education ministry's guidelines, those school officials said they can't control students living off campus.
"The number of Chinese students who are scheduled to return to our campus is nearly 3,000. It will be physically impossible for us and any other university to manage all the Chinese students unless the government imposes an entry ban on them," said an official at one of top universities in Seoul.
The official, who declined to be named, said schools have no other means of managing Chinese students other than quarantining them in their dormitories.
"About 90 percent of Chinese students at our school now live in their own place near campus. In this case, it is difficult for our staff members to check if they are following the rules on self-quarantine. However, we cannot force them to enter dormitory rooms either," he said.
