From Hwangsa to COVID-19: The Rise of Mass Masking in South Korea

Abstract

In the global response to the Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, South Korea has often been hailed as one of the successful cases in containing the disease. Commentators within and outside the country have pointed to preemptive testing, aggressive contact tracing, and the well-organized health care system to treat the identified patients as effectivemeans to “flatten the curve” (You 2020). By June 2020, the South Korean government was confident enough to promote its practices (the so-called “3 T model” of test-trace-treat) as a “global standard” (Korea Times 2020). Based on the model, the country has maintained a relatively low level of new cases, albeit with intermittent spikes. In this paper, we focus on one particular aspect of the South Korean response to COVID-19, that of facial masks, which was an important component in the broader effort to ward off the disease. As in other East Asian contexts, the use of masks has been an entrenched feature in the public responses against infectious diseases since the early twentieth century. Rather than resorting to deep cultural reasons (Friedman 2020), however, we will focus on more recent precedents since the 2000s, during which the South Korean public was exposed to mass masking. During this period, the public awareness toward airborne pollutants (including “Asian dust [hwangsa]” and particulate matter, or PM) surged, to which facial masks were mobilized as a means of personal