Coronavirus: ‘It was like my intestines were being ripped out’, says South Korean high-schooler infected by Shincheonji follower
- The Daegu student contracted the virus after a 10-minute conversation with a street evangelist, as reported in the Hankook Ilbo newspaper
- She has since recovered, but like many who have been cured, she is avoiding the public eye for fear of being shunned by others
Kim is a perfectly healthy high-schooler who lives in South Korea’s southeastern city of Daegu, the hotbed of the country’s coronavirus outbreak.
On February 20, she was accosted by an evangelist at a subway station who later turned out to be an infected follower of the controversial Shincheonji Church of Jesus – and from whom she contracted the virus.
Her Twitter posts about her infection and recovery were noticed by a reporter at the Hankook Ilbo newspaper. He wrote a story about Kim based on them, but when that journalist and others approached Kim for an interview she shut down her account and cut off all communications.
The Shincheonji religious group, regarded as a cult by most mainstream Christian churches, was linked to more than 50 per cent of the country’s confirmed infections as at the end of February – sparking much frustration and anger in South Korea.
But Kim did not know any of this when she encountered the street evangelist. Her only consideration, as a teenager, was that it would be impolite to keep wearing a face mask while talking to someone older than her – so she removed it during the 10-minute conversation. “I never imagined I would be infected during such a short period of time,” Kim, 18, wrote on her Twitter account.
