There has been much discussion of South Korea’s battle against coronavirus. It has frequently been held up as a model, and its fairly intrusive measures have been hotly debated in the West. And while the drama of extensive contact-tracing, isolating patients, deporting foreigners who violate quarantine, and so on have captured most of the conversation in the West, there is relatively little about day-to-day life under the anti-corona regime South Korea has established.

I have been living in South Korea for more than a decade, so here is a ‘day in the life…’-style recounting of the measures impinging on our family’s daily routine. They are far more widespread and granulated than many Westerners seem to realize.

As soon as I step out the door in the morning – I try to jog in the morning before my kids wake-up – mitigation already confronts you. Most South Koreans live in apartment buildings, and in our elevator there is hand-sanitizer. Before I even exit my building, I have already scoured my hands.

As I exit the apartment complex to run, the gate guard greets me. He is alone and there is almost no one around this early, but he is masked. On the trail in which I run, half the joggers and walkers are masked, and everyone keeps their distance. How people can run with a mask on is beyond me, but I try it sometimes too.

When I return, I sanitize my hands yet again in the elevator, and then I take my son to kindergarten, which just re-opened after a two-month closure. We go masked and when we reach the school door, the protocol is strict. I may enter only if I wear a mask; I may only go in as far as the foyer and may not enter the building properly. My son is three, so he routinely pulls off his mask. He gets it put back on with a friendly warning from the principal to leave it on. His temperature is them taken and recorded, as is his time of entry and emergency phone number. The class sizes are kept small, facilitated by the refusal of many parents to send their kids back to school yet. When I pick up my son later, his departure time is recorded.

My daughter, seven, does not go to school. Most elementary schools are still closed. She takes classes over Zoom. As everyone else in the world has recently learned, we too quickly find this a complicated and mediocre remedy. The best place for her to Zoom is in my home office; given that I too cannot go to work, she and I are now in the bizarre position of competing in our house to use the best webcam set-up.

Inevitably, the actual Zoom classes are uneven. The teachers struggle with new hardware and software they do not know well. The students are easily distracted. People enter and exit in the background. It is better than my daughter just watching TV all day, as happened in the first few days of the lock-down, but this semester is a mess. Given that my university has had the same problems - as apparently has every other educator in the world - I keep wondering if it would be better to simply cancel the semester altogether.

Last week was a national election, so while my daughter and I struggled through our Zoom competition, my wife, a Korean citizen, went through another round of strict layering to prevent community spread at the polls. She queued at a strict distance from other voters. To enter the polling location, she had to pass a temperature check. Once inside, she was greeted by the inevitable sanitization table. Hands were cleaned, but an extra protective layer was added: all voters had to wear provided plastic gloves too. The voting materials were handled by so many people that they were deemed unsafe for ungloved use.

After my daughter and I finish jumping in and out of overlapping Zoom classes, my wife returns to be with her. I can now go to the office for a short time for the work I cannot do at home. My university building entrance protocol is again the same. All building doors are closed and locked but one. There is a guard and a checker. My temperature is taken; I must write down my entrance time, department, destination, and so on. In the department office – I teach political science – all the clerical staff and teaching assistants are masked, even indoors around people who have all been checked already. I move to take off my mask – it is fatiguing and everyone got checked already – but the department office manager throws me a look and I leave it on. The building is basically empty. Clerical staff is there, but almost no professors or students. I leave quickly to resume working from home.

In between all this, I try to work at home. It is tough. I try to read on the sofa while my daughter Zooms, but anything which requires spreading out papers is hard. My daughter uses my desk space, and my laptop screen is small. But it is easier now that my son is at school for a few hours a day. When he was home too, we could get almost nothing done. It was all-day babysitting.

Sometime during all this, my wife tries to go shopping. It takes longer than usual. All the entrance protocol steps slow things down, as do the rules for waiting on line at the checkout. Staff is lacking, as some people just will not come to heavily traveled stores like Costco or HomePlus. And some items – bottled water especially – are frequently out-of-stock.

As the day comes to an end, the kids are bouncing off the walls. They have spent far too much time indoors. They will not sit still for dinner, much less sleep later. So we give up and take them to the apartment playground, which, thankfully, has been sprayed a lot. Inevitably, almost everyone is masked there too, and mothers bring bottles of disinfectant with them when they accompany their kids.

It is true that South Korea is starting to re-open. It is ahead of most of the world in the timeline, and it has dealt with corona better than anyone. So things are much better now. But not by that much; things are not normal. We are anticipating this sort of lifestyle for months to come. Those in countries with worse outbreaks should expect the same. 

Robert E. Kelly is a professor of international relations in the Department of Political Science and Diplomacy at Pusan National University.