Researchers warn that the next major pandemic may not be too far away. In a new paper released Monday, they estimate that a pandemic as deadly as covid-19 is expected to arrive in the next six decades, while a pandemic of the 1918 Spanish flu scale could be expected every 400 years. They also argue that the annual probability of these extreme events may increase over time, as emerging and re-emerging diseases have become more frequent in recent decades.
The world is currently embroiled in the second year of the covid-19 pandemic, which has so far occurred. dead at least 4.4 million people and probably many more. Outside of HIV / AIDS, which has at least killed 36 million since its appearance in the eighties, but not always considered a pandemic, covid-19 is the deadliest pandemic since the Spanish flu, which killed between 20 and 100 million people (most estimates are around 50 million).
However, pandemics are not as rare as some might think. The last pandemic before covid-19 was just a decade earlier — the swine flu of 2009 — and there has been an average pandemic every 20 years in the last century. But researchers at Duke University and elsewhere say not much statistical work has been done to estimate the likelihood of these major disease outbreaks, a knowledge gap they hoped to address in their new paper. published Monday in PNAS magazine.
“First of all, I should say that we are not making predictions about the future. We are characterizing the likelihood of major epidemics occurring based on historical data, ”author William Pan, an associate professor of global environmental health at Duke University, told Gizmodo.
The team examined the major recorded epidemics of plague, cholera, new flu strains and other pathogens, dating back 350 years, to work out their estimates. They eespecially focused on outbreaks of emerging or re-emerging diseases that killed at least 10,000 people. They swept away epidemics that occurred in different places at the same time, such as concurrent plague outbreaks in the 17th and 18th centuries. And them they also ruled out disease outbreaks after they could be managed by drugs such as antibiotics or vaccines, as well as current ongoing epidemics such as HIV / AIDS, malaria, and covid-19 (in practice, this meant that epidemics were not included after 1945 in their primary analyzes).
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In general, there were many variations in the frequency with which major epidemics occurred over the years, although they decreased over time. But the team says its new statistical modeling method, previously used estimation the risk of extreme weather events, such as floods, can determine the approximate probability of the probability of variable-scale pandemics occurring each year. For something like covid-19, calculate that the probability of a covid-like event occurring in a given year is now around 2%, meaning that it is expected to happen at some point in the next 59 years. It is important to note that this does not mean that the next covidi is 59 years old, but that, in 59 years, we should see it again. For something like the Spanish flu, they say something similar was expected to happen every 400 years, it would take or take a few decades.
According to other research, Pan said, the likelihood of a pandemic occurring should decrease substantially the more severe it is (so a Spanish flu event should be extremely rare). But his team’s work seems to show that this likelihood doesn’t diminish as quickly in relation to severity, so even catastrophic pandemics can happen with alarming regularity.
The work that underpins team math is based on assumptions, as are all models. So in the end, those numbers are just estimates. But the authors argue that their baseline predictions may underestimate the problem, if any. They point out that they have small-scale outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging diseases increased in recent decades. And when they explained this increase in their modeling, they concluded that the annual probability of extreme epidemics could triple in the coming decades. This could mean that there would be a pandemic on the scale of the Spanish flu every 127 years on average, not 400.
Although the team did not examine why these outbreaks are becoming more common, Pan cites other research that shows environmental changes have led to greater contact between humans and animals that can carry these exotic germs. Poverty, poor sanitation and lack of good health care systems can allow diseases to continue to spread, as well as a lack of cooperation between countries to control these threats.
The basic message here is that large-scale pandemics are relatively likely to occur, according to the authors. And that’s why we should do more to prevent them or cushion their impact when they arrive. “Obviously we show the potential threat of global pandemics, but the real implication here is how do we invest more effectively in global health and pandemic preparedness?” Pan said.
Pan said scientists should study the ongoing global response to covid-19, in order to determine which approaches should be followed or avoided in the future, while acknowledging that some interventions may not work for all future pandemic threats (masks may not be needed, for example, depending on how the hypothetical pandemic spreads). We also need more teamwork between countries, ideally aided by existing structures such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization.
“But this is not just an emergency response, but also the rise of the poorest and most vulnerable countries. We need to make sure that we achieve the Sustainable Development Goals,” Pan said, referring to the United Nations plan to reduce the impact of extreme poverty, inequality and other major threats such as climate change in 2030.
The team’s article does not include his mathematics on the probability of the Great, a pandemic deadly enough to wipe out humanity. But they created this estimate: according to their model, it is likely that a pandemic could kill all humans in the next 12,000 years. On the plus side, there are many other things that could have killed us all before, such as one asteroid, artificial superintelligence, o nuclear holocaust.