The outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome is severely eroding President Park Geun-hye’s job ratings as fears of the contagious disease have gripped the nation for over a month.

A Gallup Korea poll released Friday showed that Park’s approval ratings plummeted to an all-time low of 29 percent, down 4 percentage points from a week earlier. One-third of those who disapproved of Park’s job performance pointed to the government’s mishandling of the MERS outbreak.

This reminds us of the situation when the Sewol ferry sank in April last year. A combination of officials’ poor response to the maritime accident and the president’s failure to exercise leadership in coping with the disaster put the Park presidency in crisis.

This time too, the blame should be directed at officials. Health care administrators underestimated the danger of the deadly disease and withheld information, including the names of the affected hospitals.

For her part, Park, whose failure to take immediate charge of the rescue and recovery efforts on the day of the Sewol sinking sparked strong public criticism, repeated the same folly in the face of what is becoming an unprecedented health care crisis.

It was 10 days after the first patient was diagnosed that Park first addressed the issue, in a meeting with her aides inside the Blue House. She did not visit a hospital treating MERS patients until newspaper editorials accused her of negligence.

Nor did she decide to put off her planned visit to the U.S. until public apprehension and anger intensified over the health care crisis and its social and economic impact.

Canceling the U.S. visit did little to appease the public, with Park sending out the wrong messages at the wrong times. Park visited health care facilities, a market and a school, but those visits only deepened public discontent because her comments were incongruous with the situation.

She told school kids that MERS is nothing but a Middle East-type flu and that they didn’t have to worry about much if they observed some personal hygiene guidelines like washing their hands. Encountering Chinese tourists, she asked them to tell their compatriots at home to come to Korea without any fear of MERS.

Those comments came just as major media outlets were going big on the rapid surge in the numbers of deaths, patients and quarantines. Parents were afraid of sending their children to school, and foreign tourists, especially Chinese, were canceling their travel plans en masse. The president’s remarks, being so far detached from the reality, added fuel to the already raging fire of public distrust in the government.

Park’s belated, ill-timed messages bolstered public criticism of the government response to the contagion. Worse still, she did not have a prime minister in the critical first month of battling the disease’s spread. In the public’s eyes, there was no one in charge.

New Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, who took office Friday, 52 days after Lee Wan-koo resigned amid a corruption scandal, said he would put his own office in emergency mode and put the priority on stopping MERS.

It has yet to be seen what kind of leadership Hwang will exercise in dealing with MERS and other state affairs. Some are already playing down his role as the No. 2 man in the administration, citing his personal character and Park’s autocratic governing style.

Nevertheless, Hwang should take the lead in the nation’s endeavors to put an end to the MERS menace at the earliest possible time and initiate follow-up measures like reforms of the public health care system and infection control.

That would be the best service he could do for the president, and for the nation. Park has more than half of her five-year term remaining. Whether or not she enters an early lame duck stage will be determined by how her government under Hwang deals with the MERS outbreak.