What is a Pandemic?
Pandemic comes from the ancient Greek roots pan, meaning “all”, and demos meaning “people”, and this is used to refer to the worldwide spread of a disease. The World Health Organization’s definition of pandemic places it in alert level 6, the highest phase of epidemic alert levels, with the condition that the disease has to spread outside of a particular region into at least one other continent. Major examples of pandemics, since the establishment of the WHO, are the “1968 Hong Kong Flu”, which caused approximately one to four million deaths, and the “2009 H1N1 Pandemic”, which caused about 20 thousand deaths.

The Bubonic Plague is known for the worst pandemic in human history. It began when sailors with the plague arrived at the Port of Messina, Sicily in 1347 and spread throughout the entirety of Europe, killing over a third of Europe’s population.
Another example is the 1918 Spanish Flu, which occurred during the end of World War I and killed 50 million people worldwide, which was over three times the number of deaths caused purely by combat during World War I.
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Coronavirus (COVID-19)
The Coronavirus disease, also known as ‘COVID-19’, originated from Wuhan, China. Currently, on March 8th, 2020, there are over 100 thousand confirmed cases and over 3500 deaths by COVID-19. Even in Korea, the number of confirmed cases increased dramatically after it spread through Shincheonji. Since around 500 more cases got confirmed each day and drove many citizens in fear. As of now, however, the rate of increase is slowly decreasing and the disease seems to be reaching its peak.

Foresights
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft Inc. chose climate change, nuclear war, and pandemics as the three major threats to mankind. Over 30 epidemics came up within the past 40 years. Also, Stephen Hawking, the legendary physicist that passed away in 2018, asserted that the three major threats to mankind are climate change, asteroid impacts, and pandemics. An expert based in America claimed that “Germs and Viruses are smarter than humans”.
However, who anticipated the Coronavirus first? Bluedot, a data analysis company based in Canada, anticipated the spread of COVID-19 on December 31st, 2019, and delivered this information to its clients. This was a week earlier than the WHO’s official alarm. The founder of Bluedot, Kamran Khan, claimed the most important factors in responding to epidemics are “time” and “timing”.

Revenge of Nature
Some express the recent frequent occurrences of new epidemics as the “Revenge of Nature”, as factors such as recent destruction of nature, the surge in factories, and city-based life creating the breeding ground for new viruses and germs. Due to their nature, viruses constantly evolve and reoccur even if vaccines are found. This means that even if the Coronavirus outbreak is solved, another outbreak can occur at any time. Thus, we must gear our attention towards researching and preventing future epidemics.
 

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