Another Covid-19-wide pandemic likely to strike in next 60 YEARS, study warns

Another Covid-19-wide pandemic is likely to strike the world in the next 60 years, researchers have warned, and they could become much more common.

Covid-19 has been one of the deadliest viral outbreaks in more than a century, according to a team led by experts from the University of Padua in Italy, which has studied the spread of disease around the world in the past 400 years to predict future risks.

They found that statistically, extreme pandemics are not as rare as previously assumed, becoming more likely, and the next one will occur by 2080.

US researchers have found that the probability of a pandemic with an impact similar to that of Covid-19, and on a similar global scale, is around 2% each year.

This means that a person born in the year 2000 would have about a 38 percent chance of experiencing it and will experience another before their 60th birthday.

They haven’t explored the reason for the increased risk, but say it’s likely due to population growth, changes in food systems, environmental degradation, and more frequent contact between humans and animals carrying diseases.

The team also found that the likelihood of another major pandemic “only increases” and that we should be better prepared for future risks.

Study author Marco Marani and his team used new statistical methods to measure the size and frequency of outbreaks without immediate medical intervention.

Their analysis has focused on plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus and a range of new influenza viruses over the past four centuries.

They found considerable variability in the rate at which pandemics occurred in the past, but also found patterns in the frequency of outbreaks.

This allowed them to predict the possibility of events of the same magnitude recurring.

“The most important thing to remember is that major pandemics like COVID-19 and the Spanish flu are relatively likely,” said co-author William Pan, of Duke University.

“Understanding that pandemics are not that rare should increase the priority of efforts to prevent and control them in the future.”

In the case of the deadliest pandemic in modern history, the Spanish flu, which killed more than 30 million people from 1918 to 1920, the risk of a similar event happening again ranged from 0.3% to 1 , 9% per year.

Taken another way, these numbers mean that it is statistically likely that a pandemic of such an extreme magnitude would occur within the next 400 years.

The team also found that the risk of intense outbreaks – that is, on a scale similar to Covid-19 or the Spanish flu – is increasing rapidly.

They examined the increasing rate at which new pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 have been released into human populations over the past 50 years as part of new research.

This revealed that the likelihood of further disease outbreaks is likely to triple over the next few decades.

Using this increased risk factor, Marani and colleagues believe that a pandemic of a similar magnitude to Covid-19 is likely within 59 years, a result they write is “much lower to what is intuitively expected ”.

They also calculated the probability of a pandemic capable of wiping out all human life, finding it statistically probable over the next 12,000 years.

“This does not mean that we can count on a 59-year reprieve from a Covid-type pandemic, nor that we are immune to a calamity of the magnitude of the Spanish flu for another 300 years”, according to paper co-author Gabriel Katul of Duke.

“Such events are also likely any year of the period,” he explained, adding that when a 100-year flood occurs today, “one can mistakenly assume that one can afford to wait another 100 years before suffering another such event “.

“This impression is wrong. We can have another 100-year flood the following year.

Pan says epidemics are becoming more frequent in part due to population growth, changes in food systems, environmental degradation and more frequent contact between humans and disease-carrying animals.

He said the statistical analysis was only meant to characterize the risks, not to explain what drives them, but hopes it will spark further exploration of those reasons.

“This underscores the importance of an early response to epidemics and of building capacity for pandemic surveillance locally and globally,” said Pan.

“As well as establishing a research agenda to understand why large epidemics are becoming more common,” he added.

The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.