Some rules, however, remain including mandatory quarantine for unvaccinated inbound travellers and negative PCR tests for the fully vaccinated.
South Korea has largely managed to limit deaths and critical cases through widespread vaccination, and it has scaled back the aggressive tracing and containment efforts that made it a mitigation success story from most of the first two years of the pandemic.
Nearly 87 per cent of the 52 million population are fully vaccinated, with 64 per cent having also had a booster, according to Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency data.
In line with the easing of the rules, companies are gradually returning to their offices.
Most staff at giant steelmaker POSCO have returned to their offices this month, becoming one of the first major firms to bring people back.
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LG Electronics said it had reduced the proportion of employees working from home to 30 per cent from 50 per cent from Monday, while scrapping a limit on the number of people allowed in meetings.
A woman walks past a poster showing precautions against the Covid-19 coronavirus at a subway station in Seoul on Friday. Photo: AFP
Samsung Electronics said it had yet to implement its back-to-office plan and the public sector is also awaiting new government guidelines.
The Bank of Korea, which has 30 per cent of its head office staff working from home, is considering easing its guidelines, officials said.
The government had recommended workplaces with 300 or more employees adopt flexible working hours and have 10 per cent of staff work from home.
India slams WHO study citing 4 million deaths
India has sharply criticised a forthcoming World Health Organization study which reportedly claims coronavirus killed 4 million people nationally, the latest analysis suggesting a significant undercount of the pandemic’s death toll.
The New York Times reported last week that New Delhi had stalled the study’s release after disputing that India’s true fatality count was eight times higher than official figures.
The conclusion matches similar figures by the Lancet last month and a February study in the journal Science that calculated a Covid-19 death toll of at least 3.2 million.
But India’s health ministry said in a weekend statement that the WHO’s mathematical modelling of the pandemic was “questionable” and “statistically unproven”.
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Indian volunteers give respectful final farewell to abandoned bodies of Covid-19 victims
Several concerns were raised to the global health body over the report, including what the ministry said was a “peculiar” assumption of a relationship between lower temperatures and monthly deaths.
India had shared its misgivings through several formal communications and meetings since last November, according to the ministry. “A satisfactory response is yet to be received from WHO,” it added.
The WHO was not immediately available for comment.
Indian officials have previously disputed the methodology behind the Lancet and Science studies that also found vastly higher death tolls.
Its official figures show 520,000 Covid deaths nationally, which still accounts for the world’s largest single-country toll after the United States and Brazil.
India was battered by a devastating outbreak last year that saw thousands of people dying each day at its peak, overwhelming hospitals and crematoriums.
Its tally of daily Covid-19 cases nearly doubled on Monday from the previous day to more than 2,000 for the first time in a month, government data showed, with the southern state of Kerala reporting a big jump in deaths.
A man receives a third dose of Covid-19 vaccine at a vaccination site in Depok, Indonesia, earlier this month. Photo: EPA-EFE
Almost all Indonesians have Covid-19 antibodies: survey
Almost all Indonesians have developed antibodies against Covid-19, according to the latest government survey conducted in March.
About 99.2 per cent of the population in the survey had antibodies against the virus because of vaccinations or past infections, Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said in his weekly briefing on Monday.
That is higher than almost 87 per cent recorded in the previous survey in December. Antibody levels were also higher among respondents in the March survey, he added.
Indonesia has lifted all quarantine rules for fully-vaccinated visitors and abolished major restrictions on movement as it moves past the worst of the pandemic. The country’s new cases have dropped below 1,000 a day over the past week as daily fatalities fell to its lowest since January 31.
However, residents are still discouraged from travelling overseas to avoid exposure to new subvariant of the virus currently spreading in other countries, Sadikin said.
Reporting by Reuters, Agence-France Presse, Bloomberg