A Global Pandemic We Should Have Been Prepared for
“If there’s one positive thing that come out of the Ebola epidemic, is that it can serve as an early warning, a wake-up call, to get ready,” - Bill Gates, 2015.
Today’s novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak is not the first pandemic the world has ever witnessed. In fact, a hundred years ago, a deadly influenza virus infected hundreds of millions of people around the world. It overwhelmed hospitals and mortuaries. Could we have predicted the newest version of the influenza virus? Can experts expect when a global pandemic is about to erupt?
In 1918, the Spanish Flu, an influenza virus, emerged at the end of World War I and profoundly impacted the world. It killed far more people in its 18-month ravage, an estimated 50 million, than deaths in both of the World Wars combined. At that time, the world population was 1.8 billion people and more than a quarter of it, about 500 million people, were infected. Today, there are 7.8 billion people; if a similarly deadly virus emerged today, the result would not be 50 to 100 million deaths, but several hundreds of millions.
Another example of a flu epidemic was the “bird flu”, also known as Avian flu (H7N9), which had its outbreak in 2015, in a poultry farm in China. The H7N9 virus has been described as the single most dangerous influenza virus to have circulated in the world; in fact, more than 60% of the people who were infected died. This mortality rate is not comparable with that of the novel Coronavirus COVID-19, which only stands at 4.25% as of March 23rd, 2020. However, the novel Coronavirus spreads much easier than the Avian flu, which worries scientists and health officials all around the world. What we should have learned from these past fatal influenza outbreaks is the urgency of measures that must have been taken to prevent the spread of the infection.
Time and time again, experts have warned us about the danger and high possibility of another global pandemic, and yet, still, people moved on with their day-to-day lives and forgot about the pandemic once the it had passed. Even after the multiple pandemics that have occurred in the 20th and 21st century, our governments, healthcare systems and hospitals still reveal to be inefficient in responding to pandemics.
Just like experts have always predicted, a pandemic influenza most likely comes from an animal spreader and usually reveals to be a novel, “never-seen-before” virus, which defies all natural immunity. Yet, we are currently living in another global pandemic that could have been prevented, or perhaps contained more efficiently. Much less damage would have occurred today, if we had surveillance systems in place to assess environmental exposures of animals, hospital-based platforms been detecting potential threats, and animals being traded and sold been tested and controlled with targeting control measures.
The fact that China announcing it was able to contain the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan does not, by any means, show that other less developed countries will be able to do the same. The level of development, availability of labor, and abundant financial resources in China was very helpful to express the severity of the matter. Countries like Italy, Spain and Germany, although financially equipped, lack the necessary logistics and equipment, thus the overwhelmed hospitals. Other countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia lack the doctors and healthcare experts in the field. Countries like Grenada, Syria and Mozambique, although having very recently only confirmed one case of the coronavirus, lack the proficiency in determining and identifying cases of the novel Coronavirus in the first place, let alone treating them.
The world truly is suffering a crisis and this should not have been an unexpected one. Experts have been warning the world of its unpreparedness against the next global pandemic. The biggest challenge with flu is not being tricked into thinking that the seasonal flu is all we have to worry about. Every once in a while, there will inevitably be a variant of the regular flu that emerges and poses an existential threat to humanity: we don’t know when, but we should always presume it happen anytime soon.