It seems like the pandemic has lasted forever, but if you were hoping this would be the last novel virus in your lifetime, one of the creators of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has a less than uplifting prediction.
“This will not be the last time a virus threatens our lives and our livelihoods,” vaccinologist Sarah Gilbert said toward the end of her presentation in the annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture on the BBC. “And I’d like to finish on a high note, but the truth is the next one could be worse. It could be more contagious, or more lethal. Or both.”
Experts agree that more viruses are in our future and that there is much we can learn from our response to COVID-19. As SELF previously reported, there are a few key improvements we need to make in order to handle the next pandemic better.
We need to support health care workers so that they don’t face debilitating rates of burnout, for starters. “Many people still need to take a step back and are suffering from PTSD from the past year,” Arthur Kim, M.D., director of the Viral Hepatitis Clinic within the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, previously told SELF.
Racial inequities in health care also need to be urgently addressed—one study found that 34% of COVID-19 deaths were among non-Hispanic Black people, even though they represent just 12% of the U.S. population, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “A diverse public health force that represents all communities is vital,” Whitney R. Robinson, Ph.D., an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health, previously told SELF.
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When the next potentially pandemic-level virus knocks on our door, we need to assume that it can spread before people are symptomatic, and in people who never become symptomatic—rather than only worrying about people who are visibly ill, as we did for far too long with COVID-19. “In hindsight, we should have assumed asymptomatic or presymptomatic transmission just in case,” Tara Smith, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at Kent State University College of Public Health, previously told SELF. “I suspect we will with any other novel respiratory virus that emerges in the future.”
Additionally, our focus should be on stopping spread early, in order to prevent viruses from mutating into new strains that may not be covered by vaccination—as we’re currently facing with omicron variant. And governments need to rely on science to govern their recommendations and communicate those recommendations clearly to the public.
Last, it will take a global effort to prevent another pandemic—and money to fund public health, even when we’re not actively in a pandemic. That was one of Gilbert’s key points in her speech. “We cannot allow a situation where we have gone through all we have gone through and then find that the enormous economic losses we have sustained mean that there is still no funding for pandemic preparedness,” she said. “The advances we have made and the knowledge we have gained must not be lost.”
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Source: SELF
