I found this article from March 2018. Incredibly accurate! Let’s look at the highlights. “We need to get serious about respiratory viruses,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, who led the report. “[There’s] a lot of focus on diseases that aren’t going to be able to change civilization in a way that something that’s spread through the respiratory route would be.” CHECK!….right about that one!!
For the report they had no pre-conceptions about WHAT the infectious agent would look like. “The researchers essentially started from scratch, without any preconceived notions of what the most likely culprit of such pandemics would be” So here are the major take-aways from their report. The pathogen would be AIRBORNE………CHECK!
- It would be contagious during the “incubation period,” before people show any symptoms, or when people have only mild symptoms. CHECK!
- It would be a microbe that most people are not immune to, so there would be a large population of susceptible human hosts. CHECK!
- It wouldn’t have an existing treatment or prevention method. CHECK!
- It would have a “low but significant” fatality rate. CHECK! This last one is important to note because a pathogen the kills it’s HOST quickly doesn’t allow for that person to have enough time to spread the disease over a long period of time!
- The report also found that a group of viruses known as RNA viruses have the most potential to cause a global pandemic disaster, in part because these viruses mutate more easily than other types do. CHECK! That’s Covid-19!!
- Another important strategy to get in front of pandemic pathogens will be greater testing of patients to pinpoint the exact infectious cause of their symptoms, the report said………….Well we screwed that one up didn’t we!!!
- The first case of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic was identified in a child who had flu-like symptoms but did not have a severe illness. “That could happen again,” Adalja said……….YUP.…kids don’t get as sick.
So there you have an interesting perspective. Lots more in the article from “Live Science”……when will we ever learn from history? Here’s the article: