[Reporter’s View] Regrets in GOV's COVID-19 responses

“Gullmoosae” is a newly coined Korean word commonly used by stock investors to refer to investors who have lingering buy/sell regrets.

 

The word is a combination of the Korean word ‘~halgul (should've)’ and the bird ‘engmossae (parrot),’ which describes the individual investor who regrets the past every time without buying or selling in advance.

 

The government’s response to COVID-19 is not so different from these ‘Gullmoosae’ investors.

 

Korea has already suffered two out-of-stock crises - the lack of COVID-19 self-diagnosis kits in January followed by the lack of respiratory disease treatments such as cold medicine and antipyretics in March – due to the surge in demand that arose due to the government’s policy change to ‘With-COVID-19’ earlier on this year.

 

The government had urgently requested companies to expand their productions after the issues arose, but this was not the kind of problem that could be resolved in a matter of days.

 

Just take the COVID-19 self-diagnostic kits as an example.

 

The government had shown reluctance in using the tests until last year, citing the low reliability of the tests.

 

As a result, the kits were approved, but rarely sold in the pharmacies and were considered a nuisance.

 

This was why the companies had minimized the production of domestic products and increased exports.

 

And then, the companies received this request for mass production from the government after a sudden policy change.

 

The companies were barely able to meet the requested amount by changing the export products to domestic use and temporarily including value-pack products.

 

However, most were taken by the government, and It was difficult to find kits on the market.

 

Also, the front-line pharmacies experienced chaos due to the work of subdividing kits and fluctuating prices.

 

Consumers also had to go from pharmacy to pharmacy and convenience stores to purchase the kits.

 

The situation caused by the shortage of respiratory disease treatments is more severe.

 

Not many companies specialize in treating respiratory diseases, and the companies had reduced their target manufacturing goal compared to the previous years.

 

However, with the rapid surge in the number of COVID-19 cases, companies were suddenly hit with the sold-out bomb.

 

It was only at this time around that the government hurriedly called on the pharmaceutical companies to and visited production plants to request supply expansions.

 

However still, with large amounts of the urgently produced supplies taken by the government, customers are still having trouble finding the drug at pharmacies.

 

The government’s complacent policy judgment was what caused this confusion throughout the industry.

 

Due to the unplanned increased supply of cold medicines, pharmaceutical companies are unable to produce the other medicines.

 

Eventually, the out-of-stock situation that was limited to cold medicines has spread to other unrelated medicines.

 

And the pharmacists and pharmaceutical company employees were left to deal with the numerous inquiries that arose.

 

The government had started considering transitioning to the With-COVID-19 around mid-last year.

 

Although the period of the transition was adjusted due to various variables including the spread of the Omicron variant if the government had simulated the various situations that could arise when switching to the With-COVID-19 era, they could have stockpiled a sufficient amount in advance.

 

It is not difficult to predict that the demand for self-diagnostic kits would increase if people who are not in the high-risk group are first tested with self-diagnostic kits, and the increase in patients with mild symptoms would increase the demand for cold medicines and antipyretics.

 

In this sense, the journalist hopes that the government leaves no more regrets behind in the making of its measures for COVID-19.