Korea is quite hectic with the COVID-19 outbreak. There are countless amounts of actions the government officials did poorly, but what is done is done. Korea is now experiencing community-associated infections, which will spread quite quickly.
As a public health doctor, serving my military duty, I was forced to work at the airport quarantine station for two weeks among the time of spread. To be honest, the work was not stressful at all. The busy work of creating a system of quarantine was done a few days before I had arrived. It was also pretty exciting to be working back at the city. I also got to commute via a bus rather than driving, which was a lot less tiring.
My work consisted of taking basic history of passengers with cold symptoms and deciding whether they would be put into quarantine for COVID-19 infection tests. It was a weird feeling of how I was in charge of at least 12 hours of a person. I was the one deciding whether a person could walk into the country or not.
Upon a few days of working, I had not thought much about the quarantined people, but as my days of work was coming to an end, I was also taken to the quarantine place for tests myself. The building was in the middle of nowhere, a few distance from the airport. It was dark, I was alone in a room with only the TV as company. The nasal and throat swab hurt quite a bit as well.
I was out of the building in just two hours, and I wondered how suffocating it would have been to stay there for longer hours. Then again, I thought about how much worse it would be to be sent back, closed from the country.
I thought about the doors of heaven. I knew there was not concept of purgatory in Protestant Christianity, but I thought of how it could certainly be something to wish for when standing before the gates of heaven. Then again, I thought about how much less I would be desperate to get into heaven while alive.
It was an all or nothing situation. Where did I stand?
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