Concern over coronavirus spread as cases jump in South Korea, Italy, Iran

In Italy, the number of cases jumped to above 130 from just three before Friday.

International concern about the spread of coronavirus outside China grew on Sunday with sharp rises in infections in South Korea, Italy and Iran.

The government in Seoul put the country on high alert after the number of infections surged over 600 with six deaths. A focal point was a church in the southeastern city of Daegu, where a 61-year-old member of the congregation with no recent record of overseas travel tested positive for the virus.

In Italy, the number of cases jumped to above 130 from just three before Friday. Authorities sealed off the worst affected towns and banned public gatherings in much of the north, including halting the carnival in Venice, where there were two cases, to try to contain the biggest outbreak in Europe.

Italian health authorities were struggling to find out how the virus started. “If we cannot find ‘patient zero’ then it means the virus is even more ubiquitous than we thought,” said Luca Zaia, the regional governor of the wealthy Veneto region.

Iran, which announced its first two cases on Wednesday, said it had confirmed 43 cases and eight deaths, with most of the infections in the Shi’ite Muslim holy city of Qom.

China, which has seen the vast majority of cases, reported 648 new infections. But only 18 were outside of Hubei province, the lowest number outside the epicentre since authorities began publishing data a month ago and locked down large parts of the country.

Bot vs man: How to beat South Korea's AI hiring bots and land a job

Classes in dealing with AI in hiring, now being used by major South Korean conglomerates, are growing fast.

Technology News : In cram school-obsessed South Korea, students fork out for classes in everything from K-pop auditions to real estate deals. Now, top Korean firms are rolling out artificial intelligence (AI) in hiring — and jobseekers want to learn how to beat the bots.

From his basement office in downtown Gangnam, careers consultant Park Seong-jung is among those in a growing business of offering lessons in handling recruitment screening by computers, not people. Video interviews using facial recognition technology to analyse character are key, according to Park.

“Don’t force a smile with your lips,” he told students looking for work in a recent session. “Smile with your eyes.” Classes in dealing with AI in hiring, now being used by major South Korean conglomerates like SK Innovation and Hyundai Engineering & Construction, are still a tiny niche in the country’s multi-billion dollar cram school industry. But classes are growing fast, operators like Park’s People & People consultancy claim, offering a three-hour package for up to 100,000 won ($86.26).

There’s good reason to see potential. As many as eight out of every 10 South Korean students are estimated to have used cram schools, and rampant youth unemployment in the country — nearly one in four young people are not in the workforce by certain measures, according to Statistics Korea — offers a motive not present in other countries where cram schools are popular, like Japan.

“The AI won’t be naturally asking personal questions,” said Yoo Wan-jae, a 26-year-old looking for work in the hospitality industry.

Fear, joy, and gamification

Businesses around the world are experimenting with increasingly advanced AI techniques for whittling down applicant lists.

But Lee Soo-young, a director of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said the new technology is being more widely embraced in South Korea, where large employers wield much influence in a tightening job market.

According to Korea Economic Research Institute, nearly a quarter of the top 131 corporations in the country currently use or plan to use AI in hiring.

Is South Korea the new safe haven for Indian Swiss bank account holders?

The South Korean cryptocurrency craze might have induced Indians to shift money from traditional havens.

With Switzerland gearing up to share with India the information of Indian bank account holders, there seems to have been a massive exodus of Indian money to South Korea in the past year. Bank of International Standards (BIS) data show a 900 per cent spike in non-bank deposits in South Korean banks during 2018.

Non-bank deposits include corporate and individual deposits and exclude inter-bank transactions. These were the same deposits that were quoted by former finance minister Piyush Goyal in 2018 to defend the Narendra Modi government over Indians’ rising deposits in Swiss banks.

BIS data show that non-bank loans and deposits of Indian residents in South Korea stood at $904 million at the end of 2018. The previous year, Indians had held just $1 million in South Korean banks. Since the Modi government came to power for the first term in 2014, Indians barely held about $4 million in that country. By comparison, such deposits by Indians across the world was $9.5 billion in 2018 — $1 billion more than a year before.

This astronomical rise seems to coincide with a surge in non-bank deposits in South Korea from across the world. Such deposits in South Korea from individuals across the world almost doubled in 2018 — from $19 billion a year before to $37 billion.

Even as South Korea has seen a stupendous surge in money held by Indians as non-bank deposits, there has been a gradual outflow of money from Swiss bank accounts and certain other tax havens traditionally used for stashing wealth to evade taxation. According to BIS, Indians held just about $85 million in non-bank deposits in Swiss banks in 2018, compared with $347 million in 2014. Swiss bank deposits fell every year during the tenure of the first Modi government.

The initial trend of an exodus from Switzerland and an influx into Hong Kong’s banks also seems to be cooling off. Indians’ deposits in Hong Kong touched a five-year high of $1.4 billion in 2015 but fell to almost $600 million in 2018.

There was also a significant fall in such deposits by Indians in other tax havens like Isle of Man and Jersey. The trend of post-recession increase in non-bank deposits by Indians in the United Kingdom (UK), meanwhile, continues to show an upward trend. In 2018, it touched a five-year high of $2.7 billion, the highest among all nations.

Business Standard