EP #300 - 06.29.2021 - Controlling COVID-19 in South Korea w/special guest Kiheung Kim

Today I welcome medical sociologist Kiheung Kim to talk about the many different aspects of COVID in South Korea.

Before I get started with Kiheung Kim, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that today marks the 300th episode of COVIDCalls.  When I started doing COVIDCalls in March of 2020 it was a resource for daily discussion when information about how to react to the pandemic was literally evolving minute by minute.  To me the urgency of the daily calls was about getting disaster experts into conversation about their research, and getting their expertise into the news cycle.  Over time the project became a site of exploration—a place (among many) where the widest variety of experts/survivors/witnesses could be in dialogue (I was lucky to be on the mic with them).  Everyday we have been trying to make sense of the pandemic, and trying to also make sense of the tools we have to create and sustain this knowledge. 

Over the past couple of months—especially as the pandemic has moved into its next act in North America, I’ve noticed a shift.  Not that the search for knowing COVID is by any means at an end, but rather that people are turning to COVIDCalls as a way to take stock of what happened over the past 18 months.  I should say, for guests who are expert in Brazil or India, or here where I am in S. Korea—this is not yet time for a post action report or a eulogy—COVID is still a very serious daily threat to life.  Still, there is among many a sense of passage—a movement out of one life and into another.  For me that means waiting for a vaccination—but the wait isn’t endless—I see it on a calendar.

I have heard people say that they are eager just to forget and move on—I even had one person chastise me on Twitter for wanting to linger with the memory of COVID, almost as if I’ve made a choice to reside in the darkness of it.  I’ve thought about that a lot—and you know what maybe there is a truth there—even when my own daily risk goes down through vaccination (not yet!) I know I will want to reside in this space of uncertainty and concern a while longer—this is a place of vigilance, and of action, and I worry that I will—that society will—move to closure and forgetting before the power of the uncertainty and fear provokes us to act.  And act we must—we have so much to do for our health systems, our struggles for justice, our schools, our care workers—COVID shows the need for reform at every turn.  So let’s get vaccinated and live, but let’s not let go of this feeling of—what else can I call it—fear, of deep concern—until we’ve done what we can do for a safer future. 

Disaster Memory is not apolitical, it is not uncritical, it is not behind glass at a museum——memory can provoke—and the future of COVID memory is literally being made right now—we are making it. The memory of COVID is already a battleground of competing explanations and ideologies—not all of them in good faith, and some of them very dangerous.

It’s not a choice to remember or forget COVID.  It’s a choice among competing narratives, competing memories.  Don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t that bad—or that those many months were all bad or wasted—it wasn’t one thing or another.  COVID was, and is, as diverse as life and society itself.  COVID forced us to create new practices of work and sociability, even some new ways of living—some attention to the brokenness of the old ways--that we might not want to give up so quickly.  That’s good and useful.  But at the core there is also a struggle to learn hard lessons from it. Let’s work together to sustain the lessons based in the grim truth of unnecessary deaths, compassion for those still suffering, and a just recovery to come.

Let me thank Shivani Patel, Bucky Stanton, Hyunah Keum, and Eleanor Mayes.  AND let me tell you that in a few weeks time the CCalls research portal will launch—plus we have more guest hosts coming: including Kim Fortun, Jacob Steere-Williams, and Kristin Urquiza (thanks Felicia Henry).  Stay tuned.

Kiheung Kim is a professor at Postech (Pohang University of Science and Technology) in South Korea. He graduated from the sociology department at Sogang University and did his PhD at Science Studies Unit of the University of Edinburgh where he worked on the social studies of infectious diseases, in particular, mad cow disease (BSE, scrapie and vCJD). 

Kiheung worked at the Welcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London and moved to do laboratory studies at the Chemical Engineering Department, Imperial College London.

He is interested in the social aspects of animal and human infectious diseases like Foot-and-Mouth Disease, MERS and Covid-19.

He published a book, "Social Construction of Disease: From Scrapie to Prions" (Routledge, 2007).