These days when the warm weather makes me feel good, I often spend time with my young daughter at the playground where I haven’t been able to play because of the cold. You can see many children and parents in the apartment complex, but most of them are still wearing masks. For more than three months, the obligation to wear masks in public transportation as well as indoor masks has been lifted, but masks still seem to be a necessity. As many foreign media have shown interest, surprisingly, Korea is still unable to escape from ‘mask’ and ‘Corona 19’.
There are various reasons why people still do not take off their masks, but the important factor that I felt in the medical field is the problem of ‘understanding’. Many people do not understand what COVID-19 specifically is and what the role of masks is. I wonder if I’ve been wearing a mask just because of government regulations or to be noticed by others. Masks become contaminated by repeatedly putting on and taking off, or by touching them with your hands. Even so, I don’t pay much attention to hand hygiene. We do not pay much attention to the air pollution of the place where the body contacts or stays. It seems that he is only obsessed with wearing a mask. Rather than obsessing over masks without understanding, we need to achieve mitigation of infection without regulation through correct understanding.
The most frequently explained topic during treatment is ‘cold’. Because there are many misunderstandings about the common cold. Basically, Korea calls medicine Western medicine, so the history with medicine is short. For this reason, terms and concepts are often confused. There is no code for cold in the disease code classification. Although upper respiratory tract infections and nasopharyngitis are used as diseases of the common cold, cold is not a medical term. A cold refers to an acute upper respiratory infection caused by a viral infection. A virus is one of microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi, and the upper respiratory tract is a part including the nose, pharynx, and larynx. In other words, it is called a cold when any of the more than 200 types of viruses infect these parts of the body and cause respiratory symptoms. Both Corona 19 and MERS are upper respiratory tract infections, but they were only classified separately because different contagious powers and complications were found. Influenza is not a ‘severe cold’, but an infection with a virus called ‘influenza’. Cold and flu are completely different diseases. The original upper respiratory tract infection can also accompany bacterial infections such as tonsillitis and pneumonia, and in severe cases, it can cause sepsis and even death. If you understand the cold and Corona 19 like this, you will be able to understand not only treatment, but also a focus on complications such as pneumonia.
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes the transmission route of Corona 19 as ‘inhalation’ through breathing, ‘direct contact’ of infected droplets, and ‘surface contact’ through environmental surfaces. It is now more important to accurately understand and prevent these pathways. Just as not everyone can live wearing protective clothing to eradicate the epidemic, and full-body CT scans cannot be performed on everyone to increase the diagnosis rate, the social and economic opportunity costs of various rules regarding COVID-19 must be weighed. .
First, it is necessary to reexamine unnecessary medical losses. Patients who need treatment but suffer distance and time loss due to restrictions on treatment facilities because they were confirmed positive in the COVID-19 test, to excessive tests conducted for a diagnosis rather than for treatment purposes at work, etc. many. As quarantine measures are eased, unnecessary medical and economic losses also need to be reduced. Masks are the best tool to prevent contagion, but they must be worn through ‘understanding’ rather than through regulation to improve language, emotional, and cognitive development problems in infants and negative consequences such as chronic hypoxia and headaches caused by masks. You will be able to.
Overseas media are not currently praising Korea. We are talking about the difference between them and us, and we are just looking for various reasons for it. Here, we should not simply laugh and pass it over as a fun cultural difference, but we will need to improve various negative cases that persist in the difference.
Dong-A Ilbo Next Generation CEO Academy Seong-Min Lee Surgeon 3rd Class