According to a company that performs predictive health analytics, there is a 27.5 percent chance that a pandemic as dangerous as COVID-19 will occur in the following ten years as viruses start to appear and spread more and more frequently.
Rapid vaccine rollout is the key to lowering the risks of death caused nu such viral infections.
As per London based Airfinity Ltd., factors such as climate change, increased overseas travel, growing populations, and the danger posed by zoonotic diseases raise the risk.
The likelihood of a fatal pandemic, however, drops to 8.1 percent if effective vaccines are distributed a hundred days after the identification of a new pathogen, per the company’s modeling.
Airfinity notes that the worst case scenario for a virus similar to the bird flu that mutates to allow human to human transmission could result in up to 15K fatalities in the United Kingdom in no more than 24 hours!
Health professionals are focusing on getting fully prepared for the next possible global danger now that COVID-19 is more of a thing of the past.
Three significant coronaviruses that cause SARS, MERS, and COVID as well as the swine flu pandemic have already emerged in the previous 20 years or so.
Concerns are already being raised by the H5N1 avian flu strain’s fast spread.
Even though just a few individuals have been affected and there are no indicators that it has been transmitted from human to human, scientists and governments are worried that the virus may be changing in ways that might make it easier to spread due to the spiking rates in birds and rising invasion in mammals.
Finally, Airfinity says that there is an urgent need for pandemic preparation measures since several high-risk infections, including MERS and zika, lack licensed vaccines or treatments, and current surveillance practices are unlikely to identify a new pandemic in a timely way.
