The Next Pandemic. And The Next.

Our current set of difficulties with the coronavirus is, apparently, a "starter pandemic."

Just Google "next pandemic" and you're set for a couple of days of grim reading.  The WHO has a prep page, and an annual simulation exercise (the last one was "cat flu").  Prep for the next pandemic, by the way, will cost $30 billion.  Annually.  Quite a bargain, apparently, given that the last six months have cost us around two and a half trillion.  

There is even a Disease X, which is an avatar - a hypothetical stand-in - for the next of the one and three quarter million unknown viruses, existing in the world today, which "spills over" from animal to human.  About forty to fifty percent of them seem to be able to make this jump.  This apparently happens a lot, but most, it seems, are not transmissible from human to human.  But there only needs to be one - and then the next one and the next one.

This 'spillover' of viruses from animal to human seems to be increasing as history progresses.  As populations of humans and animals increase (especially commercially clustered meat animals like pigs and chickens) over time, this factor - and others - have resulted in habitat destruction for many populations of wild animals, and the chaos and adjustment required by those populations have brought them, in many instances, into much greater contact with human populations.  Deforestation and the wildlife trade each has an outsized effect.  Add to this the effects of global climate change - which is happening, by the way, and has been disrupting habitats and migration patterns for over a century (National Geographic says that half the species on earth are on the move), and there are really a whole lot of opportunities for novel viruses to jump from animal to human.

This is not new.  The Black Death which, as we have seen, killed up to half of Europe in the fourteenth century, is a good example.  Habitat destruction  - in one case, huge fires in large Chinese cities - killed a lot of rats, and destroyed, at least temporarily, the places where the rats lived.  So the disease-bearing fleas abandoned the sinking rats and found another salubrious host - us.  Apparently, the plague did not often find its way to human hosts where rats and humans lived in harmony. 

Anyway, we seem to be burning down a lot of buildings, killing rats and freeing disease-bearing fleas to find - us.  Figuratively, of course.  Literally, I guess, we're upsetting the ecological balance that kind of kept everyone to himself.  All bets are off, and one of the few things we can count on is that math says we'll have another one, soonish.

The new world will contain more pandemics, like a set of never-ending Russian matryoshka nesting dolls.  Don't lose your mask.