A little over a year ago both South Korea and Japan issued revised pandemic plans, and last November Hong Kong held a Coordinated Avian Flu Drill `Amazonite'.
Despite the obvious concern, the kind of large-scale pandemic drills that were quite common 10 or 15 years ago (see below) have become rare.More recently, Switzerland announced a major revision to their pandemic plan - and we've seen a number of countries (Japan, UK, Canada, USA, EU, etc.) make arrangements to procure limited quantities of pre-pandemic H5 vaccines.
- Hong Kong : Exercise Redwood - 2009
- UK Exercise: PPE Usage In A Pandemic –2008
- Singapore: Public Involvement In Financial Sector Pandemic Drill –2008
- Florida's Pandemic Simulation – 2008
- Idaho BlogEx : July 28th –2008
- UK: Lessons Learned From Winter Willow – 2007
While I expect we'll learn more after the review is completed in October, we've this (translated) announcement today.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) conducted a nationwide mock training exercise to prepare for animal influenza infections in humans (September 1, Mon).Last modified on 2025-09-01
Department in Charge: Diagnostic Management Division
Contact 043-719-7845
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) conducted a nationwide mock training exercise to prepare for animal influenza infections in humans.- Field inspection of the full-cycle rapid response system, from securing diagnostic reagents for animal (avian) influenza (AI) to human infection testing.The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) (Director Seung-Kwan Lim) will conduct a nationwide mock training exercise for a rapid response system for diagnostic testing in preparation for the outbreak of animal (avian) influenza (AI) infection in humans from Monday, September 1 to Friday, September 19.
- Strengthening public-private cooperation with the participation of 33 organizations, including the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, local governments, and private testing agencies.
This training is a practical cooperative training designed to examine and improve national response capabilities by assuming a crisis situation of "the first domestic AI human infection case (H5N1) and community spread," and carrying out the entire process from securing diagnostic reagents to initiating testing.
A total of 33 organizations will participate in the training, including the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, 6 Disease Response Centers (including the Jeju branch), the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, 20 city and provincial health and environment research institutes (including support), 4 excellent infectious disease pathogen confirmation institutions*, and diagnostic reagent emergency production institutions.
* Catholic University of Korea Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, Korea University Anam Hospital, Seoul National University Hospital, Severance Hospital
This mock training will be conducted under the assumption that a reagent whose performance has been jointly evaluated by public and private experts will be approved for emergency use by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, mass-produced, and distributed to public and private testing institutions.
In the training, each testing agency will conduct diagnostic tests using the distributed reagents and report the results promptly, thereby verifying the effectiveness of their on-site response capabilities and procedures.
On Wednesday, October 22, all participating organizations will gather for a comprehensive discussion to share training results and develop improvement plans for the overall rapid response system.
The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) has been reviewing its diagnostic testing system through simulated domestic outbreaks of the novel coronavirus in 2019 and the Nipah virus in 2024. This training is particularly significant in that it is a practical exercise that involves actual reagent production and testing, unlike previous trainings.
Many of the CDC's pandemic guidance documents now have broken links, have been `retired', and can only be found (if you look hard enough) in the https://stacks.cdc.gov/ archive.The institutional and technical shortcomings identified through this training will be reflected in future institutional improvements and enhancements to the private sector cooperation system.
Lim Seung-kwan, director of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said, “Diagnostic testing for infectious diseases is the most important initial measure in a crisis situation, and the accuracy and speed of diagnosis are key to the overall crisis response strategy.” He added, “We expect this training to serve as an opportunity to strengthen our practical response capabilities and further solidify practical cooperation among relevant organizations.”
Ready.gov provides a rudimentary pandemic preparedness section, but the robust guidance that was once available to the public is now very hard to find, including the following 16-page Household Pandemic Planning guide, which emphasized the use of NPIs - or Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions - during a pandemic.
While it is true that No Pandemic Plan Survives Contact With A Novel Virus, having some kind of a plan is infinitely better than having no plan at all.
As we saw in 2020, once the alarm is sounded, our opportunities to prepare become immediately limited.
