K-POP megastars BTS today cancelled four concerts they were due to hold in Seoul in April, their agency said, as the coronavirus outbreak spreads in South Korea.

“Cancellation of Seoul concerts,” their agency Big Hit Entertainment said on a verified Twitter account, after the boy band held a press conference to promote their new album in an empty hall on Monday because of the virus.

“We regret to announce” that the Seoul concerts have been cancelled, Big Hit Entertainment said in a statement.

The four concerts, scheduled to take place between April 11 and 19 at Seoul’s Olympic Stadium, home to the 1988 Games, were expected to draw more than 200,000 fans.

It was “impossible at this time to predict the scale of the outbreak”, it said, creating uncertainty over the movement of staff, equipment and fans, making the cancellation “unavoidable”.

BTS – or Bangtan Sonyeondan, which translates as Bulletproof Boy Scouts – is the first K-pop group to top charts in the United States and Britain.

Their latest album Map of the Soul: 7, released last week, was the most pre-ordered South Korean album of all time, with more than four million copies sold.

South Korea reported 256 new coronavirus cases today, taking its total – the highest in the world outside China – to 2,022, the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said.

More than 90% of the new cases were in Daegu – the city at the epicentre of the outbreak in South Korea – and the neighbouring North Gyeongsang province, it added, with no further deaths keeping the toll at 13.

South Korea’s total is expected to increase further after checks began on more than 210,000 members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a secretive entity often accused of being a cult that is linked to around half of the country’s cases.

A 61-year-old female member developed a fever on February 10 but attended at least four church services in Daegu – South Korea’s fourth-largest city with a population of 2.5 million – before being diagnosed. – AFP, February 28, 2020.