Three years ago, the Covid-19 pandemic wreaked widespread havoc on the world. but The Corona pandemic is not over yet While the researchers warn of other epidemics that could spread, they stress the need to draw lessons from the ensuing crisis to better prepare for the future.
Will the pandemic end soon?
The World Health Organization warned in early December that the Corona pandemic is not over yet. And while at least 90% of the world’s population enjoys relative immunity, its director general Tedros Adhanom Gebresius stressed that there are “defects in the monitoring, testing, genome identification and vaccination, which provide ideal conditions”. For the emergence of a troubling new mutant that could cause a percentage Great deaths”.
Corona exams in China due to high number of infections
The World Health Organization is the entity authorized to declare the end of a pandemic. In this context, last Wednesday Philippe Sansonetti, microbiologist of the Pasteur Institute, declared during a forum: “This is a very important and often controversial moment”, considering that the organization is not ready to “declare the end” of the pandemic Crown again.
Experts expect the pandemic to gradually develop into an endemic virus that continues to spread and cause a regular outbreak of infections, and that’s what’s happening now with measles or seasonal flu.
Will this disease ever be eradicated?
This is unlikely. The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic, which spread globally in 2003 and claimed the lives of around 800 people, has been contained thanks to isolation and quarantine measures.
The smallpox virus had previously been “eradicated” in 1980 thanks to a vaccination campaign conducted by the World Health Organization.
However, this scenario remains rare. Philippe Sansonetti stressed that “eliminating a virus means that the disease must be clinically evident and there should be no animal host, and a highly effective vaccine that protects for life should be provided. However, Covid-19 does not satisfies none of these conditions.
On the one hand, people with corona often show no symptoms, which negatively affects isolation procedures. Unlike smallpox, the virus is transmitted to animals and can continue to spread among them and re-infect humans.
Also, vaccines protect against Dangerous forms of the disease, but little protection again from infection and there is a need to obtain boosted vaccine doses.
What are the main risks for the future?
For his part, said Etienne Simon Laurier, director of the Evolutionary Genomics Unit for “ARN” viruses at the “Institut Pasteur”: “Today viruses are left to circulate a lot”, every time they infect a person, new ones can appear mutations and can cause relatively strong forms of the disease.
“There’s no reason for us to think the virus will get kinder, even if that belief works for everyone,” he warned.
One of those infected with Corona in intensive care in a Turkish hospital last year
Other viruses affecting the respiratory system may appear. Since the emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and Covid, “we have detected a dozen coronaviruses in bats that can be transmitted to humans,” says Arnaud Fontanet, emerging diseases expert at the Pasteur Institute, revealed.
Interestingly, 60% to 70% of emerging diseases are of animal origin, meaning they are naturally transmitted from vertebrate animals to humans and vice versa.
With humans occupying larger swathes of the world, and through travel and intensified interaction with animals, humans are helping to change ecosystems and facilitate virus transmission.
How do we prepare?
Arnaud Votanet saw that “much can and must be done at the onset of any epidemic”.
The researcher said that it is also necessary “to have the ability to develop tests very early” at the beginning of the epidemic, which facilitates the isolation of patients very quickly, “but unfortunately today we are still responding and not anticipating,” as he said. stated put it.
At an international level, the concept of “One Health” (one health) which emerged at the turn of the new millennium and which requires a global approach to what is at stake in health is being reintroduced with a close link between human and animal health and the environment.
A draft global agreement on pandemic management was discussed in Geneva last week, hoping to avoid the mistakes that have characterized the fight against Covid-19.
