[imagesource:here]

It’s hard to know when the world will finally see the back of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Vaccines are being widely distributed, but it still feels like we have a long way to go, especially in South Africa.

But it is good to put the magnitude of this situation into perspective.

COVID-19 has shown us just how threatening a global pandemic can be, and just how unprepared we might be for the next one, if and when it comes along.

We turn to some insight from Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an infectious disease critical care and emergency medicine physician, who spoke to Inverse about a future pandemic’s toll on human life.

He was asked what would happen if a pandemic arrived that killed 10% of the global population, and how a deadly pandemic could transform the Earth by 2121.

For some perspective, the global death toll from COVID-19 is at least three million and counting, with at least 142 million confirmed cases.

Adalja says that 10% of the global population dying off from a single event, such as the Black Death, is highly unlikely.

Still, any pandemic with even a fraction of that plague’s death toll is a massive cause for global concern.

Paraphrased, this is what he told Inverse:

Many people think about pandemics as extinction events for the human species, but it’s highly unlikely you find a pandemic able to do something on that level.

Our mitigation efforts, as well as idiosyncrasies in the human immune response, are likely to leave some segment of the population able to withstand the infection.

It’s much more valuable to think about infectious diseases that have mortality rates of around 20 percent.

But you don’t need an outlandish scenario to realize the importance of infectious diseases. We can barely even handle a pandemic that has a 0.5 percent mortality rate, so you need to get to those cataclysmic levels to really end up having a de facto cataclysm because of human errors.

If a pandemic was to wipe out at least 10% of the human population, Adalja says we would basically see a snowball effect throughout industrial civilisation.

The average age of the majority of people dying will make a difference, and can play a major role in how resilient society may be:

If it’s 72, it’s very different than 19. If it’s killing people in the prime of their life, the way HIV did in many African countries, it’s a much bigger shock than if it’s killing people who are elderly.

We see it with COVID-19, which isn’t uniform in its effects across age groups.

Adalja doesn’t think the next pandemic will be caused by bacteria, or a multi-drug resistant bacteria.

This is because he believes in the power of antibiotics, which even if they don’t work thoroughly, manage to make some kind of difference to the longevity of bacteria.

It’s a false assumption to say bacteria are going to do all this and we’re going to do nothing. Human progress and human knowledge will have expanded in 100 years in ways I can’t even imagine.

In a very short time, we have made huge medical and technological strides, and will continue to do so.

This could really work in our favour if a new, terrifying pandemic was ever to hit us any harder:

…we’ve gotten new therapeutics. We’ve developed bacteriophage therapy. We’ve gotten much more sophisticated medical care in 100 years.

I don’t think that you can say if it’s an arms race that only one side is going to be engaged in it and that we’re going to stay static.

Even if we are well prepared going forward, we don’t want to jinx it.

[source:inverse]