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A sign detailing Korea’s masking mandate stands at an indoor shopping mall in Seoul on Jan. 18. (Yonhap)

“Sick patients flood in at the university hospital, filling up already overcrowded wards. With doctors and nurses overwhelmed [. . .] planned surgeries have been cancelled to help cope with the influx of winter admissions,” began a recent article in UK daily the Telegraph.

“To British ears, this will all sound familiar. Yet these scenes are unfolding in Sweden, where a winter crisis not dissimilar to our own is also wreaking havoc with the health service.”

The Telegraph also quoted the following warning from the Swedish Public Health Agency: “The spread of respiratory viruses is at a high level and the burden on the healthcare system is great.”

The number of people dying from COVID-19 in Sweden is four times what it was at the beginning of last year. According to Our World in Data, an international statistics website, the seven-day average of COVID-19 deaths in Sweden was 6.8 per 100,000 population as of Jan. 12 (the most recent date for which figures are available). That was the third highest in the world, following Macao (20.1) and Hong Kong (9.0).

Sweden’s COVID-19 death rate is half what it was in mid-January 2021 (12.5 people), before the public vaccination campaign began, but it’s much higher than it was in mid-January 2022 (1.5 people).

Norway and Finland were praised as the European countries with the best response to COVID-19 in the early pandemic, but those countries are also seeing a disturbing rise in deaths. Deaths per 100,000 population were at 1.2 and 0.9, respectively, in mid-January 2021 and 0.8 and 1.6 in mid-January 2022, but those figures had risen to 2.3 and 4.3 on Jan. 12.

Europe isn’t the only place where people are still losing their lives amid relaxed government restrictions and apathy in the press and public — that’s also true of East Asia and Oceania.

As of Jan. 12, Japan’s death rate per 100,000 population was 3.2, a far cry from the levels in early 2021 (0.5) and early 2022 (0.02). The situation is similar in Australia (2.2) and New Zealand (1.7).

South Korea shouldn’t be resting on its laurels, either. The death rate per 100,000 population was 0.4 in early 2021 and 0.9 in early 2022, but 1.0 on Jan. 12. Seoul needs to carefully heed the lesson of China, which faces a horrific surge after the government there eased pandemic restrictions.

The number of patients requiring hospitalization is becoming a serious issue in countries including France, the UK and Italy. This year, the number of French patients who are hospitalized for COVID-19 has remained at the 19,000-24,000 level, roughly the same as in early 2021 and 2022.

The UK has more than 10,000 people hospitalized with the disease, while in Italy the figure is holding steady between 7,000 and 9,000 people.

Even in the US, the number of COVID-19 admissions isn’t falling below the 30,000-40,000 range, after climbing above 150,000 at the beginning of 2022.

COVID-19 vaccines have now been available around the world for more than two years, but as of Jan. 17, the global full vaccination rate was stuck at just 63.5%. Given that, encouraging people to get the vaccine probably won’t be enough to end the COVID-19 pandemic.

That’s why the European office of the World Health Organization recommended on Jan. 10 that people wear masks indoors and on public transit given concerns about the spread of the highly infectious XBB.1.5 subvariant of the Omicron strain of COVID-19.

The Korean government, which touts a scientific approach to infectious disease control, decided Friday to downgrade its indoor mask mandate to a recommendation as of Jan. 30. But when we think about our precious family members, relatives and neighbors — and especially those in most need of protection — it’s not yet time to take off our masks.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]