Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Image
Topics: Coronavirus, Health, Science
Joe Harker
The Covid-19 pandemic has had more of an impact on the world than almost any other disease in our lifetimes.
It is a scant few sicknesses which can result in entire countries sending their populations into lockdown in an attempt to prevent the spread of disease and thus keep deaths down.
Over seven million people are confirmed to have died from the pandemic since it began, and Covid seems here to stay with new variants that mutate and pose a threat to life.
The loss of life, societal upheaval and economic damage caused by the pandemic is enough to make anyone wish it had never happened, let alone have to face another event like it in their lifetime.
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Unfortunately, on that front, there's some bad news, as epidemiologist Michael T Osterholm warns that 'The Big One' could be coming and deadlier than the coronavirus, meaning millions of deaths around the world.
He outlined a hypothetical scenario in a book written with Mark Olshaker about 'theoretical but plausible' future pandemics, which would be 'like a biological bomb going off'.
As for the chances that a pandemic to rival the one caused by Covid-19 could occur within our lifetimes, someone has crunched the numbers and come up with some sobering figures.
A video published by Ted-ED explained that in the past 400 years the longest stretch the world went without a sickness that killed at least 10,000 people during an outbreak was four years from 1670 to 1673.
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Deadly diseases are a fact of life, though advancements in modern medicine have worked wonders to keep death tolls down, and there would have been many millions more killed by Covid-19 without dedicated work to tackle the disease.
There are an estimated 1.7 million undiscovered viruses which infect mammals and birds, and around 40 percent of these are deemed to be at risk of becoming a threat to humans.
A team of scientists who crunched the numbers, factoring in diseases, global population, the rate of travel and how prepared people were to deal with it, generating 'hundreds of thousands of virtual pandemics' to model out the possible impact.
In the end, they calculated that the risk of another coronavirus level pandemic was between 2.5 and 3.3 percent each year, so it's quite unlikely to happen so soon.
However, stretched over a lifetime that's a chance you're taking every year and the odds of it eventually happening grow.
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Another team looked at historical instances of pandemics such as the Spanish Flu and found that major incidents such as this had a risk of occurring between 0.5 and 1.4 percent.
Finding something between these teams and their figures, Ted-ED put the annual risk of a pandemic to rival Covid at around two percent a year.
Worryingly, they calculated that the chance we're going to have another pandemic like that in our lifetime is 78 percent, making it seem very likely.
If you want to be incredibly optimistic and focus on that 0.5 percent suggestion from the team who looked at historical pandemics then it drops down to 31 percent, but going really pessimistic at 3.3 percent from the team which analysed the modern world hikes the chances up to 92 percent.
Essentially, the chances that you'll have to live through something similar to the Covid-19 pandemic again in your lifetime is high, and we can only hope that advancements in virus treatment have developed to such a point that stopping it will be more effective.
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Scarily enough, we won't even know it's started until it's too late as Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in the US, warned that 'the next pandemic could be beginning right now' and knowing when and where it could come from is not something we can do yet.
Let's hope we've learned our lessons.