South Korea's 119 emergency service received a total of 53,935 reports last year requesting a search for a missing person, more than double the number of the previous year, the National Fire Agency revealed this week.
Some 36 percent of those reports were requests to find people aged 65 or older, with the 119 dispatch service cooperating with local police to seek the missing person in 7,819 cases. This figure also marked a steep increase from 5,137 cases in 2021.
"We think this is due to the rapid increase in single-person households and the senior population, and also due to a surge in reports related to random crimes last year," an NFA official said.
According to Statistics Korea, there were 9.93 million single-person households in South Korea last year. The percentage of the country's 65 and older population was 17.4 percent, which is expected to skyrocket to 47.7 percent by 2072 if current trends continue.
Overall, emergency service personnel were dispatched to the scene 1.3 million times last year, up 9.2 percent from 1.2 million times the year before. Actual rescue operations were conducted 698,560 times, up from 679,081 the year before.
About 18.4 percent of cases reported to the emergency services were car accidents, followed by mountain-related accidents at 7.6 percent. Those in their 50s were most likely to require such assistance, as 16.5 percent of those rescued were in that age group.
