FEATURE
Planning for the next pandemic Words Robert Kravitz
Why we are more likely than not to see more in the future.
A
s of May 2021, we seem to be inching our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has announced that those fully vaccinated no longer need to wear masks outside or inside, in most situations. Many of us are feeling some relief. We know that with the pandemic behind us, our lives and businesses can return to some sort of normalcy. Further, many of us believe that a pandemic like COVID-19—which has infected more than 164 million people, causing 3.5 million deaths— will likely never happen again. Unfortunately, that may not be the case. Although COVID-19 is one of the most severe pandemics since the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed more than 50 million people, we have had other pandemics since then, and we are likely to see more in the future. (See sidebar: What is a pandemic?) We need to look to the past to find out what we can learn from those earlier pandemics.
PAST PANDEMICS
1957: Asian Flu: One of the most underreported pandemics was the 1957 Asian flu. It traveled from Hong Kong to the United States and became widespread in England. A second wave followed in 1958. Eventually, more than a million deaths globally were reported—116,000 of them in the United States. 66 INCLEAN September / October 2021
1981: HIV/AIDS: Although this pandemic has been widely reported, many people do not realize that it dates back several decades. HIV/AIDS is believed to have developed from a chimpanzee virus circulating in West Africa as far back as the 1920s. It spread to Haiti in the 1960s before progressing into the United States in the 1970s. However, it wasn’t until the early 1980s that the public heard much about HIV/AIDS when it started spreading very quickly. Today, about 35 million people worldwide have died from AIDS. 2003: SARS: SARS, not COVID-19, is viewed by public health officials as the world’s “wake-up call” when it comes to worldwide pandemics. The lessons from SARS have helped keep diseases such as H1N1 (swine flu), Ebola, and Zika from becoming global pandemics. However, and unfortunately, this wake-up call was generally unheeded by the public and officials in some parts of the world. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak is believed to have started with bats, spread to cats, and from cats to humans in China. In time, cases were identified in 26 other countries, more than 8,000 people were infected, and 774 died. Unlike COVID-19, which appears to have been tamed by vaccines, no vaccines were developed to help prevent the spread of SARS. Quarantine efforts proved most effective, and within about a year, SARS essentially disappeared.