Scientists predict another pandemic in coming years even as world grapples with coronavirus outbreak
The entire global community struggles to contain the spread of the deadly novel coronavirus. Scientists, however, saw the pandemic coming. Spending years researching emerging diseases, they had long predicted that a virus belonging to the coronavirus family was likely to cause an outbreak.
"If you look at the coronavirus literature, there were scientists who knew this could happen since at least 2015, maybe even earlier," Dr Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University, told Business Insider.
What is more, scientists predict that another virus might strike in the coming years. And the next time, they hope, politicians pay more heed to them and prepare themselves to fight the next pandemic, experts said.
Many countries, including the US, were poorly prepared to handle the coronavirus crisis and now they are now feeling the pinch.
"We're seeing shortages of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and shortages of ventilators. These are things we have been warning about for 20 years or more," Dr Smith added.
But some politicians claim to be in the dark. During a press briefing, US President Donald Trump said, "Nobody knew there’d be a pandemic or an epidemic of this proportion. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before."
But scientists warned of the dangers
Viruses belonging to the new coronavirus — SARS and MERS virus — triggered an outbreak in 2002 and 2012. The new coronavirus, which is closely related to SARS and MERS, is the third virus from this family to strike.
Evidence suggests that the virus originated in bats, before spilling over to another intermediary animal. Humans, in turn, may have picked up the virus from the intermediary animal.
(Getty Images)
All of these viruses are zoonotic, meaning the virus jumped from animals to humans. Around 60% of all infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic. On average, one new infectious disease emerges in humans every four months, according to the United Nations Environment Program.
For decades, a scientist and the former director of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) emerging threats named Dr Dennis Carroll has been vocal about the threats from zoonotic viruses.
"A large pool of viruses are circulating (in the wild) and we don’t become familiar with them until we see a spillover event and people getting ill," he told Nautilus.
Dr Carroll said that the outbreak was predictable. "We’re not establishing the kind of safe practices that will minimize the opportunity for spillover. If we better understood where these viruses are circulating and understood that ecology, we would have the potential to disrupt and minimize the risk of spillover," he said.
Others predicted a pandemic, including Bill Gates, the US Intelligence team, infectious disease experts like Dr Michael Osterholm and Robert G Webster.
In fact, a Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch had foreseen the coronavirus pandemic. A study predicted that a coronavirus circulating among bats in China would jump to humans.
“The threat of pandemic flu is the number one health security concern,” Luciana Borio, the then director of Medical and Biodefense Preparedness Policy at the National Security Council (NSC), said at a symposium at Emory University in Atlanta in 2018. The Trump administration had dismantled the NSC.
“Are we ready to respond? I fear the answer is no," she added at the symposium.