Moderna will facilitate vaccine supply to Korea -- negotiators

The government said Tuesday that Moderna has promised to speed up the planned shipments of the Covid-19 vaccine for August and September to make up for the recent supply cut.

The U.S. vaccine maker made the promises during a recent meeting with the Korean delegation led by Vice Minister of Health and Welfare Kang Do-tae.

Moderna had told Seoul that it would supply less than half of the 8.5 million doses of its Covid-19 vaccine planned for August. That put a hamper on the government’s goal to administer the first doses to 36 million people, or 70 percent of its 52 million population, by September and achieve herd immunity by November.

Korea has vaccinated 23,050,358 people – 10,679,603 with the AstraZeneca vaccine, 9,981,587 with Pfizer's vaccine, 1,129,777 with Janssen's vaccine, 62,757 with Moderna's vaccine – with the first shot of the vaccine up 661,839 from the previous day.

The figure accounts for 44.9 percent of the country's population.

"The vaccine maker said it would make utmost efforts to advance the delivery of vaccine scheduled for September," the delegation said. "The company also said it would fix the exact amount and delivery schedule of the vaccine by the end of this week."

On Tuesday, new Covid-19 cases fell back to the 1,300s due to fewer tests over the extended weekend.

The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) confirmed 1,373 new virus cases, including 1,323 local infections, raising the total caseload to 226,854. Six more people died from the virus, raising the death toll to 2,173 with a fatality rate of 0.96 percent.

The KDCA said Korea has confirmed 3,014 more cases of four major contagious variants of the new coronavirus over the past week, including 2,594 of the highly transmissible delta variant.

The caseload of such infections reached 13,780 here, with the number of delta cases, first reported in India, tallied at 10,421, according to the KDCA. In addition, health authorities said there is a possibility that the lambda Covid-19 variant, first detected in Peru and more resistant to vaccines, could cross the border, making the situation worse in Korea.

The country has also reported more than 2,100 cases involving people who tested positive for Covid-19 even after being fully vaccinated.

Health authorities said they are reviewing more enhanced antivirus measures to contain the pandemic.

The greater Seoul area has been under the most stringent restrictions for more than a month, and some regions outside the greater voluntarily imposed the tightest curbs. Still, the number of daily infections has topped 1,000 for 42 days in a row.

However, the Education Ministry has decided to proceed with its policy to expand school attendance for the second semester. Last week, the ministry eased social distancing guidelines in schools for the fall semester.

The measure aims at running in-person classes even under Level 4 distancing measures as long as there are attendance caps to keep a safe distance among students. The cap varies depending on school years, with half of the third to sixth graders in elementary schools students allowed to attend school, two-thirds of middle schools students, and a half for 10th and 11th graders in high schools.

Kindergartens, first and second graders in elementary schools, and schools for disabled children will be exempt from the restrictions regardless of the severity of the pandemic. According to the ministry, high school seniors can also attend in-person classes full-time to prepare for the national college entrance exam slated for Nov. 18.