This pandemic is like nothing that’s been seen in anyone’s lifetime. The question is whether this is something which is extremely unlikely to be repeated, or whether there’s something about modern life and living conditions which made this happen which which would be likely to be repeated. Perhaps not in this specific form (bat hosts, cornavirus etc.), but some sort of virulent disease that could spread and damage the world much in the manner of the covid-19, with different details.
The answer may depend to a large exent on whether the covid pandemic was the result of a natural process or a lab accident - ISTM that the latter is more controllable. But even if it was a natural event, it’s very possible that the pandemic was the result of a confluence of so many unlikely events that it’s unlikely to ever be repeated ever or at least in our lifetimes. Or not.
IMHO it has to do more with human psychology and our modern lifestyle. Misinformation is abundant and people are divided, lazy, and uncooperative, even in the face of a common enemy. We’ve already sorta known this WRT the effects of climate change, which is a bit more slow moving than the pandemic, but COVID-19 put the spotlight on our inner savagery toward one another like nothing prior. If something else comes along on the scale of the pandemic or worse, we’re well and screwed.
I think COVID-19 is just the “Intro Band” for a host of very bad things that are either going to happen or are in progress as we speak, and that includes more nasty bugs. Any time a species becomes overpopulated, increased disease is just one of the negative results. To make matters worse, the overpopulation is concentrated heavily in Asia where many of these diseases are arising.
Not only is this not the worst pandemic in living memory (which would be polio), it isn’t even the wrost that epidiologists have been trying to warn the public and governments about for decades. SARS-CoV-2 is particularly pervasive because of what a transmissible respiratory contagion it is and how many carriers are asymptomatic, but a particulalry virulent strain of influenza with an IFR>5% or a highly transmissible hemorhagic virus would be more disruptive by orders of magnitude. COVID-19 is a love tap compared to really worst case virulent disease threats; a novel smallpox-like infection would be abolutely devastating.
It’s more likely to be repeated simply due to how much thoroughly humanity is connected via travel and urban living. We did have SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, MERS in 2012, and an assortment of other pandemics/near pandemics in decades before that.
I’m surprised we didn’t have a big one like COVID sooner than we did. I think in the future we’ll probably see one of these every 5-15 years. We’ll see them circle the globe like COVID thanks to media-driven stupidity around resisting public health measures. Eventually there will be a pandemic that kills children and young adults like the so-called Spanish Flu, and maybe then we’ll all start to wake up.
We’ve been warned that something like this could happen for decades. It is a bit of luck, as well as the actions of health organizations in many countries cooperating that has prevented a global epidemic like this in the past.
We can’t count on luck forever, and with the current political climates, we can count on international cooperation even less. I expect that this will become a fairly regular occurrence, at least once a decade, probably more like twice.
We were lucky that COVID is as low mortality as it is, as bad as it is. The next one could very well have a much higher mortality rate, causing far greater disruptions to our fragile structures of civilization.
Unfortunately, I doubt it. It will just cause even more divisiveness as everyone looks for someone to blame.
If anything, modern life has reduced the amount of epidemic/pandemic events.
Of course it will be repeated - epidemics and pandemics are natural occurrences in dense animal populations. The only real question is how often. Once a generation? Once a century?
What has been unlikely is the lack of respiratory pandemics this past century. You can thank things like modern sanitation for the reduction in epidemics of diarrhea diseases (where modern sanitation does not exist there are still outbreaks). Smallpox has been eradicated via vaccination. Polio, measles, etc. greatly diminished by vaccines. Y. pestis, which caused the Black Death of Europe, is vulnerable to antibiotics and yay, modern rodent control in cities.
Modern public health, sanitation, and medicine have beaten back the great pathogens of our species. Which, ironically, leaves open pastures for new ones. Like covid-19. There are always new diseases cropping up, it’s called evolution. Bacteria and viruses keep seeking new opportunities and if a mutation allows a jump to a new species that is highly social and has dense populations you get an epidemic/pandemic.
Disease is a natural part of the natural world. It’s unlikely to be eliminated any time soon.
Not to minimize the lives it’s ended and altered, but I think the relative harmlessness of Covid has given us the luxury of divisiveness. If kids and young adults were dropping dead in the streets, governments would be able to execute draconian measures as needed and objectors would find much less support.
Or I’m a pollyanna, and we’re seriously fucked if the next new bug is more deadly.
There was certainly early dismissal of the danger of the original “wild-type” SARS-CoV-2 virus with the argument that it only kills the old and sick who were going to die soon anyway, to the extent that certain public figures and pundits were arguing to eliminate restrictions and encourage transmission in order to rush to herd immunity and economic recovery at the explicit expensive of the deaths of older people. That this was never quite true (and even if it were, was a abrogation of moral responsibility) didn’t prevent it from being propagated and still forming the current basis for the claim that SARS-CoV-2 is no worse than a typical flu season, and that all of the excess deaths are due to “other causes” that were fraudulently lumped into the basket of COVID-19.
The same argument was used against school closures and to justify essentially unregulated reopening of schools with public health decisions being made by school administrators with very limited guidance and for the most part no budget or clear mandate to enact recommended protective measures, hence all of the bullshit about “3 feet distance”, optional masking of students, wildly varying policies on testing and quarantine, et cetera, that even if not putting school-aged students at risk posed a hazard to adult teachers and staff for whom inadequate and perfunctory measures represented a serious occupational hazard. Regardless of well beyond prediction excess deaths among both children and school staff, state governments (in the US at least) have done little and some have notably tried to restrict or prohibit even basic measures to inform staff, parents, and the public at large of infection rates and outbreaks.
I have essentially zero faith in certain political movements to take any effective action to limit contagion, and even among those that do to consistently consult and follow the guidance of public health officials over their own political instincts. If we had an actually deadly pandemic with an IFR>1% across all age brackets, there would be more panic but I don’t know if the response would actually be more consistent or effective. The way the COVID-19 pandemic has become politicized defies any logic or reason, and trying to predict mass human psychology is an exercise in pseudoscientific witchery.
Yes, this. We got lucky and these are the pandemic training wheels. I hope we learned enough from this one.
The big confusion from the earliest days seems to be about method of transmission. “Treat it like smoke, not dirt” is the big takeaway – even the most credible scientists seemed to get this wrong in the first days of COVID. Remember wiping your groceries down, and leaving packages outside for a day in the sun?
Aerosol transmission is how COVID works. And it’s incredible how much more transmissible delta is. Just 10 minutes in a closed room with someone that has delta, and you’ll get it. That’s about 5x to 10x faster than the original strain.
Yes. A big part of the drumbeat of “COVID is harmless” is predicated on “it doesn’t affect kids and young people, just grandmas who are frankly a negative return on shareholder value anyhow.” If little Graydens and MacKortlens start dropping like flies over the winter holidays, along with their Oakley-wearing goateed dads, you can bet selfishness will kick in and start doing its elegant work.
The only problem I’d foresee is armed paramilitaries shooting “urban” people in the street to enforce curfews and lockdowns, and locking up immigrants in close-quarters concentration camps. With the full blessing, encouragement, and possibly enablement of law enforcement.
For sure, if the next pandemic is smallpox-level, the same people who now think the government is guilty of overreach will probably think the government isn’t doing enough and take matters into their own hands.
Measles is another pandemic worse than covid, in living memory: That pandemic only ended in the 1960s (and started so long ago that I don’t think anyone knows when it was).
I feel like a terrible person saying this, but it’s possible that what we’ve learned from the lives lost in this pandemic will save considerably more lives when the next respiratory pandemic hits.
It seems incredible that we got this far without people realizing the science dirived about droplet behavior in a study from before WWII about aerosols had been misapplied to other types of viral droplets. Hopefully what we now know (or rather, what we’re still actively learning) will led to a more informed response so we’re looking at MERS amounts of deaths not Covid-19 levels.
I believe that it was around March or April of last year that I checked for research on transmission of the common cold. There was a study that was only a few years old, from a university, that had identified that only about 2% of transmission was likely to come from touching inanimate objects that had been sneezed on or otherwise contaminated (and, if I recall right, this was based on indoor testing).
I assume that the are better studies available now, but certainly there was stuff in existence that was fairly modern.
One might hope (and for certain epidemiologists are going to be studying this pandemic and the effectiveness of various measures for decades to come) but the fact people are still arguing about the value of masking, and the idea that any mask, whatever material and construction, and however it is worn, is as good as a properly fitted respirator mask, indicates that in fact a lot of lessons about respiratory contagion has not been adequately digested. People seemed to place all of their hopes and dreams in the vaccine—which, to be fair, was oversold to the public as the instant pandemic-ender rather than one of many tools to control contagion and prevent infection—with little attention paid to changing building and public transit ventilation, comprehensive disease surveillance and reporting systems, using graduated lockdowns and travel restrictions to keep contagion to a minimal level, and altering any of our social constructs to track and limit the spread of any respiratory infection, SARS-CoV-2 or otherwise.
I see little evidence of actual preparation for “the next one”, especially when so many people are still denying that this pandemic is still occurring.
Does that really count as a pandemic, though? I mean, I’m not sure of the technical definition, but as it’s normally used, I’d say that “pandemic” implies a period when there is extraordinary and unusual spread of a disease with significant social ramifications, not a more-or-less steady state while people go about their ordinary lives. Clearly there have been measles pandemics, e.g. when it first hit the New World, but I’m having difficulty wrapping my mind around the idea that the world was in a constant state of pandemic measles before the 1960s; it seems to make the word so broad as to be essentially meaningless.
We’ve had measles outbreaks, for sure (and despite the ready availability in the developed world of highly effective vaccines). Measles is endemic across essentially the entire human population, so despite the infectiousness it is not prone to pandemic-level outbreak, especially because infectious people tend to be highly symptomatic and therefore easy to isolate. Chicken pox could technically be considered pandemic because even though nearly every adult human has been exposed or vaccinated with high immunogenicity it still manages to spread around the globe in seasonal waves, fortunately with rare lethality in children.
We have had influenza pandemics but none since 1918-1919 that were particularly virulent or had severe morbidity or mortality on young and healthy people. There is, of course, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which despite how controlled and treatable it is with public education measures and modern retrovirals, still kills upward of 1.5M people per year, most in sub-Saharan Africa due to poor access to healthcare and low literacy rates. A real dangerous influenza has long been on the minds of epidemiologists because of how readily influenza A strains swap genes and become essentially novel pathogens, but with the betacoronaviruses in the SARS/MERS lineage repeatedly adapting to humans through cross-species transmission, there is an entirely new and unexpected threat that isn’t going away even if we get the current SARS-CoV-2 variants under control.
I can’t speak to your pollyanna-ishness, but I agree we’re seriously fucked when the next bug shows up. It’s been almost 2 years since COVID started making its rounds and we’re still working through serious waves of the disease.
