Slow Treadmills, Slow Music: The 53-Page Covid Rulebook

SEOUL—South Korea’s Covid-19 infections are growing quickly, so wellness officers have demanded an quick slowdown. Not of the virus. Of treadmills and gymnasium songs.

As needed by new government procedures, Lee Seong-min has reprogrammed his Seoul conditioning center’s eighteen treadmills. They can go no more rapidly than three.7 miles an hour, a brisk walking tempo for quite a few.

The venue’s piped-in songs, generally a collection of energized K-pop, cannot exceed one hundred twenty beats per moment. He switched the playlist to old-faculty ballads.

“Most persons hear to their very own songs in any case,” explained Mr. Lee, a person of the gym’s trainers.

Up-tempo tunes and jogging could generate too much air droplets that could spread the virus, officers argue, worsening a coronavirus outbreak that is South Korea’s major ever. It has prompted an unusually thorough prescription for what is pandemic-friendly and what is not, collected in a fifty three-web page rulebook and baffling to some.