The unprecedented spread of COVID 19 has brought the issue of pandemics to the forefront, to better understand and prepare ourselves for a future event of this magnitude or even localized epidemics. This is not the first and not the last pandemic humanity has faced and will face. Scientists have been warning for years that we will face a deadly pandemic in the near future. The US government, until 2019, funded the project āPREDICTā in order to study and identify infectious diseases for the purpose of understanding how to avoid and fight the spread of diseases. An even more ambitious project, the Global Virome Project, also seeks the same objective. An important question arises:
Is it possible to predict future pandemic?
Large initiatives underway
75% of newly emerged diseases that affect humans are of Zoonotic origin, transmitting between animals and humans. In order to better prepare ourselves and possibly predict the outbreak of viruses with pandemic capability, large initiatives and projects were created for that purpose.
The Emerging Pandemic Threats program includes four projects: PREDICT, RESPOND, IDENTIFY, and PREVENT, was being funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), until Donald Trump cut off funds in 2019. Over the span of 8 years, the PREDICT project has discovered nearly 1000 viruses. The Global Virome Project, proposed in 2016; it plans on discovering nearly all the viruses that could infect humans; however, it is still a concept.
The Answer isā¦ Nearly Impossible
According to Jemma Geoghegan and Edward Holmes, two virologists based on Sydney, efforts to predict or prevent pandemics will not succeed. Simply, the number of existing viruses is too many to accurately calculate the odds of predicting and preventing pandemics. Approximately 4400 viruses have been discovered, a meager number considering the millions of viruses yet to be identified. It is estimated that 500,000 undiscovered viruses have the capability to transmit to people.
āWeāre only just coming to terms with the vastness of the virosphere.ā Says Geoghegan.
There are millions of variables to take into account in each level of the viral contraction that could create an infectious disease, the environment, the animal host, and the virus itself.
According to Kristian Andersen, from the Scripps Research Institute, predicting pandemics āis simply impossibleā¦ What youāre trying to predict is likely something that happens maybe once out of tens of billions of encounters, with one virus out of millions of potential viruses. You will lose your fight against the numbers.ā
Thereās hopeā¦
Despite the shortcomings, technological advancements have made is much easier for us to create a vaccine in record time. We shouldnāt be quick to dispel efforts in predicting pandemics; Jonna Mazer the global director for PREDICT argues that if we held the same complaints in weather forecasting 100 years ago āwe wouldnāt have created the data that lets us forecast the weather, which we can do pretty well now.ā Although itās still impossible to predict the occurrence of pandemics, effort should be focused on detecting it early on. Kristian Andersen suggests detecting the first cluster of cases. Instead of actively trying to prevent pandemics from occurring, we need to develop a more effective and rapid framework in containing the spread of a disease. One company – Kinsa – is working on a smart fever detecting device capable of measuring fever fluctuations and collecting data, which is sent to the company for analyzing and mapping out the anomalies that would arise in contrast to the regular fever inducing infectious seasons. This will greatly help authorities detect hotspots and promptly take measures in detecting and containing a viral infection before it makes its way to a wider landscape.
