Korea’s Incheon Airport to Open a Cool Cargo Center to Store COVID-19 Vaccines

South Korea’s Incheon International Airport has been a great help in delivering COVID-19 vaccines and ingredients worldwide. Its new cool cargo center, which is about to open in September 2021, could be a possible option for storing COVID-19 vaccines depending on the government policy.

The Cool Cargo Center

With a size of 2,533 square meters, the center would be located at terminal 2 of the Incheon Airport. Due to its key location, fragile and perishable items such as fruit or flower and vaccines don’t need to load in the other cargo terminal. This would decrease the transshipment times, the cost of the airport and minimize the impact on perishable products.

Operated by Korea Air 

The newly established cool center would be operated by Korean Air, which owns another 1,292 square meters sized cold chain cargo terminal in the Airport. The firm has extensive experience handling COVID-19 vaccines since it worked with Korea’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport (MOLIT), KDCA, the Korean military and police, and UPS to bring the first shipment of Pfizer vaccine to Korea.

It had also helped deliver vaccine ingredients from Korea to Amsterdam with cold chain technology, keeping the storage temperature under -60 °C throughout the transportation process.

Korea Ramps Up Vaccination

Korea was slow on mass inoculation due to a global supply shortage. In May, the countries approved the vaccines developed by Moderna, making the approved vaccines to four. Recently, Korea has accelerated the pace of vaccination, expecting to reach its target for the first half of 2021.

Currently, Korea has fully vaccinated 2.3 million people, which means the vaccination rate was close to 4.4%. According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), the vaccination rate of people who administered the first dose was 16.4%.

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Author

Tyler Chen

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