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Minister of the Interior and Safety Jeon Hae-cheol on Feb. 28 chairs a virtual meeting of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters at Government Complex-Seoul. (Ministry of the Interior and Safety)

By Min Yea-Ji and Lee Jihae

All multipurpose facilities including restaurants and cafes from March 1 will temporarily halt the vaccine pass system, meaning visitors will not have to enter their QR codes when entering such facilities.

Minister of the Interior and Safety Jeon Hae-cheol on Feb. 28 said in an opening statement at a meeting of the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters at Government Complex-Seoul, "Considering reorganization of the quarantine system that factored in omicron's characteristics and fairness among ages and regions, we will from tomorrow temporarily halt the vaccine pass system at 11 multipurpose facilities including restaurants and cafes."

The 11 facility types are restaurants, cafes, entertainment venues, indoor sports centers, noraebang (karaoke boxes), public saunas, places for racing horses, bicycles and boats and casinos, internet cafes, party rooms, multi-rooms that feature karaoke, games and movies, massage parlors and (indoor) sports stadiums.

The suspension of vaccine passes seeks to allow public health centers, which have heavily invested in personnel and resources to issue the passes to confirm negative test results, to focus more on managing high-risk confirmed cases. The government said the new measures will raise its capacity a notch to respond to omicron on-site.

"To boost our capacity to respond to the omicron variant at front-line sites, we will send from today 3,000 public officers from 42 central government departments to 258 public health centers nationwide this week," Minister Jeon said. "We will also sequentially deploy 1,000 military personnel through this weekend."

"Local governments nationwide will also do their best to respond to the surge in confirmed cases by deploying about 32,500 personnel through the reassignment of administrative personnel as well as public health center staff."

"The rise of confirmed cases has doubled every week since the third week of January due to the effects of omicron's spread," the minister added. "The average number of daily confirmed cases has jumped more than 17 times from the end of last year, when the delta variant peaked. Yet key quarantine indexes are being managed relatively stably such as the number of critically ill patients and deaths and the utilization rate of hospital beds."

"The expected supply of rapid antigen test kits in mid-March is 210 million, thus overall supply and demand will see no problems," he said. "From this week, we will distribute free rapid antigen test kits sufficient for two tests per week to children, students and the underprivileged. We will also supply an adequate volume to the private sector including pharmacies and convenience stores."

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