...The week before Lunar New Year we heard of a flu-like virus that was hitting China and starting to spread rapidly. China that weekend decided to cancel all New Year's festivities and ask people to stay home to stop the disease from spreading. There had been travelers in and out of Korea to China and there was fear that it would spread here. I don't remember if we had any known cases in Korea at that time but the next week China started to lock down full cities demanding residents to stay in their homes. Their infected and death rate was growing rapidly.
Of course, due to travelers going back and forth, the virus did start to spread some in Korea. At the beginning of February we only had about 30 something cases and no deaths. I had asked the boss if we could start to request that the students wash their hands before every class. The numbers in Korea were going up. By the second week there were over 50 - then 80.... We had even started wearing masks in class to teach also asking students to wear them. In the course of a weekend the numbers doubled and someone in our area became infected. While things didn't shut down, there would be stories about businesses that had the KCDC come in to disinfect. The numbers seemed to double daily by the end of that weekend. We went into school Monday, February 23rd and literally 90% of our students didn't come. The next day we made the decision to close for the rest of the week at 70% pay and hope things were better by the next week.
Yet still, the numbers were increasing fast. Panic and fear of a new virus was hitting Korea harder than the virus was. Schools everywhere were closing (most universities and private academies had been on winter vacation since the end of December). Public schools were pushing back their return from winter break.
So, the numbers reached the thousands because of some church cult that showed symptoms but refused testing and went around to large assemblies spreading it. Most confirmed cases are a result of that specific incident. But that also caused our school to decide to stay closed another week. The boss messaged us the 27th saying we couldn't work and due to parents asking for refunds for March (since they decided to keep their kids home for the month), we wouldn't be getting paid. There's still a lot of debate over what the actual legalities are about it but we couldn't afford not to get paid.
We requested a meeting the next day to try to decide what other options we had, such as online classes. After a 4-5 hour brainstorming session we decided to try to recruit students for online classes and hope it was something to sustain us.
March 2nd we started our thrown together attempts at classes via Skype and planning every class individually for each student. Honestly, I only ended up with three one on one classes but they proved to be a lot more work and energy than regular group classes. We were not told IF or how much pay we would receive (it's too soon to burn bridges when we need all the support we can get right now). I think we're all trying to stay semi-hopeful that we'll get at least half or maybe even the 70% like before.
We are now going into our second week of online classes with no clear idea if this is sustainable or if/when schools well resume.....
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