It’s been 570 days since I had last posted on this blog, and therefore 570 days since my warning of a potentially looming pandemic.
Back on the 5th of January, 2020, I wrote my first blog post about reports of an ‘atypical pneumonia’ originating from China, and how the situation at the time could potentially unfold into a pandemic. The takeaway from that article in short, concerned the previous failings of the Chinese government in the handling of the early 2000’s SARS-CoV-1 outbreak, and how if these mistakes were repeated, the consequences could be horrendous.
Without going into detail in this post, there are a plethora of reasons as to why we are in the situation that we are in now and an equal amount of reasons as to how this could have been avoided. Instead of talking about the past, in this post I aim to look forward and think about some of the implications of this pandemic on the future of the human race; this is the biggest and only warning sign that there is for the governments of the world to understand that a society crumbling, civilisation destroying, economy crippling pandemic is almost guaranteed, and, above all else, we are not prepared for it.
The chart above visualises the most important aspects defining how dangerous an infectious agent is and shows that this is defined by an interaction between the ability of the agent to infect between and within hosts, along with how deadly to a host it is once it has infected it. Effectively, the more dangerous the agents lie towards the top right side of the chart, and the less dangerous it is, its position will be further towards the bottom left.
If we consider SARS (which includes SARS-CoV-2, the causative pathogen of COVID-19), this group of viruses is considered quite infectious and quite deadly, but in relative terms it sits at the end of the scale that includes the less dangerous infectious agents. Yet when we think back to the last year, and the implications the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus has had, you can only imagine the devastation that a virus, bacteria, or other pathogen (most likely a novel influenza) could cause in the same circumstances. Unfortunately we would be looking at 10s of millions more deaths, collapse of healthcare systems and the potential collapse of governments themselves.
Worlds leaders, governments and external organisations MUST come together at the end of this pandemic, and come up with a detailed but simple and uniform structure to tackle pandemics when they inevitably arise again. SARS-CoV-2 from an epidemiological, political and logistical standpoint has taught us an incredible amount about how ready we are to handle a more dangerous and devastating emerging pandemic and unfortunately, the results of those teachings are bleak.
There is still plenty of time to prepare ourselves and come up with a plan from a political standpoint to prevent this happening again, but we can only hope that becomes a reality in order to preserve our way of life.
Thanks for reading.
The World of Infectious Diseases 