Korea thought it was ready for Covid, now it's eyeing the next threat

South Korea had one of the world's lowest Covid fatality rates, with the third-fewest deaths per 100,000 people out of the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Two weeks before China disclosed it was investigating a cluster of  mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan in late 2019 -- what the world now knows as Covid-19 -- South Korea’s top health officials gathered for a quarterly table-top exercise to plan their response to a theoretical health threat.

The hazard? A never-before-seen pathogen emerging in China that was causing a spike in pneumonia cases.

The timing was a fluke. But the war-gaming, and choice of subject, wasn’t. Korea had learned painful lessons from an outbreak just four years earlier of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS. The country overhauled the