COVID-19 won’t be the last pandemic of our lifetime, and South Korea must make better investments and preparations for future events, experts said Thursday. On this day last year, March 11, the World Health Organization characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic.

Yet another “disease X” -- a currently unknown pathogen with the potential to cause a serious international epidemic -- could be just around the corner, according to epidemiology professor Dr. Chun Byung-chul of Korea University in Seoul.

“The next pandemic might come along even before COVID-19 wanes, we don’t know. What we do know is that that there is going to be another one,” he said in a phone interview with The Korea Herald.

“Luckily, scientists quickly came up with vaccines and treatments this time. But that is not always going to be possible.”

The epidemiologist of over 20 years said COVID-19 has laid bare the shortcomings in the country’s pandemic preparedness.

“If there is one lesson that we can take away from this pandemic, it’s that our preparations have so far been lacking in practical considerations,” he said.

“I feel like there haven’t been enough discussions about how we can sustain essential functions of society when an epidemic strikes, like making sure kids won’t be missing school, or letting people stay economically active.”

Chun said pre-pandemic planning has so far “taken a back seat” in Korean politics. Warnings from public health experts often go unheeded or are even dismissed as “alarmist” until an emergency happens and proves they are right.

“Efforts to plan and prepare for possible pandemics don’t really have a place in our political reality. I just hope that COVID-19 is enough of a wake-up call to bring about a change in priorities.”

Korea has endured several plagues in the past two decades -- from SARS in 2003 to swine flu in 2009 to MERS in 2015. But once they subsided, the scars and struggles slipped from the collective memory “as though it never happened,” said infectious disease professor Dr. Kim Woo-joo of Korea University.

“The next pandemic is coming, it’s just a matter of when,” he said, echoing Chun’s assessment. In fact, new viruses are emerging more frequently now than before.

Kim said their emergence was largely anthropogenic. Although the WHO is still investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, many suggest it may have been a result of spillovers from wild animals at a wet market in Wuhan, China.

“The still ongoing practice of hunting, trading and eating wild animals in developing worlds, coupled with the lifestyle of the more developed worlds -- like people’s penchant for traveling, tendency to congregate in crowded cities and inability to act on climate change -- have gotten us where we are now.”

Dr. Shin Hyoung-shik, president of the Korean Society for Zoonoses, said COVID-19 serves as a reminder that people “must learn to reduce unsolicited contact with wildlife.”

“COVID-19 is just one among the long list of illnesses caused by close contact between people and wild animals. And our increasingly overpopulated world will leave less space left for wildlife, which will in turn give rise to more and more outbreaks of zoonotic viruses,” he said.

An epidemic expert at one of Korea’s largest hospitals, who asked to be quoted anonymously, said transparent communication and open information sharing regarding a potential problem in the initial stages were necessary in an effective global response.

“China was criticized as having withheld key information such as whether human-to-human transmission is possible,” he said. “Any reluctance in alerting the international community will lead to some devastating missteps in preventing a global spread of the disease.”

For Korea, its geographical proximity to China made it especially vulnerable.

Precisely for this reason, in mid-December 2019, about a month before Korea reported its first patient, the then-Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ran an emergency drill in anticipation of the domestic arrival of a new infectious agent from southern China.

“Countries need to be communicating any potential risks for successful public health emergency management.”

To date COVID-19 has sickened 93,733 people and killed 1,648 in Korea, according to the official statistics.

By Kim Arin (arin@heraldcorp.com)