Surviving The Next One !

Now that the Coronavirus numbers are falling lower on a daily basis it is time to take stock and try to determine how this monster caught the world unaware and did as much damage across the globe as a world war.  It shattered the economy of most countries and by sheer good luck an amazing number of people affected by the virus made a full recovery.

Science has been warning us that the biggest threat to humankind  is the emergence of a pandemic with a high mortality rate.  We had an early warning when Ebola broke out in Africa and later both MERS and SARS spread across the world. Now this Coronavirus has increased both the economic destruction and the lives lost beyond those earlier outbreaks combined.

It originated in China, the world's most populous country and it is vitally important that we discover the precise cause.  That is being obscured by political point scoring and it is being suggested it escaped from a weapons research laboratory.  China is sensitive to criticism about how early it sounded the alert and what it did to contain the virus and is unlikely to fully cooperate in a global enquiry to ascertain the precise cause.

We now know that the Ebola threat originated from what are known as " wet markets " where native animals are butchered for human consumption.  Those same wet markets are a fact of life in rural China and some scientific thinking relates to the presence of bats being slaughtered for  human consumption.  It seems fairly clear that all of these threats originated when disease genetics managed to transfer from one animal species to another and the focal point of that transfer was the animal mix at wet markets.

We had a lucky escape.  Ebola is still active but it has been contained in Africa. This Coronavirus was survived by most younger, healthy people and caused death mostly to the elderly.  Unless we track down the precise cause and make changes it is likely we will encounter a pandemic that will take civilization back to the stone age.   The world - as we know it - will cease to exist.

There seems no possibility of stopping those wet markets.  There are parts of the world so poor that the only sustenance comes from what people can grow - or catch.  Meat from any source becomes a vital and welcome part of the daily diet.  Without it, local populations face malnutrition - and death.

It is now essential that we put aside our differences and allow a scientific enquiry to track this Coronavirus back to its source.  It will be the " how " and the " where " knowledge that will allow civilization to put in place the cures and the vaccines that prevent the destruction of the human species.

We live with the certainty that one day we will face a pandemic that is far more deadly than this one which served a warning to the world !