<< Go back to The future we deserve.

Author: Lucas González Santa Cruz, aka LucasG
Body of article: about 650 words.
Discussion page for this essay: Talk:TheFWD_lucasgonzalez_My_ideal_panflu

The next severe influenza pandemic

For most people on this planet, the pandemic that started in 2009 was mostly "hype" and "unnecessary worry". Not many have died but they were younger than with seasonal flu. It might have started off much worse, or become more deadly after the first wave, but it didn’t. So what’s next?

The nature of the challenge

In the past 300 years, flu pandemics have happened once every 10-50 years. Each one starts when a flu virus present in non-human animals mutates or swaps genes with another virus, and a fresh human-adapted virus emerges. Many people without specific immune experience are infected in two or more epidemic waves. When the virus is not new for most people we can no longer call it a pandemic and it becomes the new seasonal flu.

Pandemics are very different from each other. The 1918 pandemic, by most estimates, killed 50 million from a 2000 million global population. The ones that started in 1957, 1968 and certainly 2009 were very different. The next one? There are some known candidates viruses, but science can’t yet predict which virus will cause it, how contagious it will be, what will be the proportion of severe and lethal cases, or which age groups will be most affected.

It’s a different fast-changing world. The globalisation of people and stuff, the specialisation of vital functions and the potential for simultaneous behaviours - buying and otherwise - may combine to make a modern deadly enough pandemic much more disruptive than past ones. Specifically, even though we can guess what proportion of severe and lethal cases will make our health-care resources even more insufficient, we have no idea how bad things have to be perceived to strongly motivate health-care providers to prioritise their own families, transport specialists to leave much of their load behind, and civil populations to start massively going by their gut feelings rather than by any official recommendation.

Actionable preparedness is cheap insurance

Safe, early, high-yield, almost print-your-own vaccines - which would give us the same immunity we have for seasonal viruses - belong in the global layer of infrastructure, out of reach for most of us, and some kind of mechanism to simply make it happen is not yet visible if it exists at all. The rest of the action is distributed in more hands.

If we ever need to decompress and maybe even reduce the size of waves, then reduction of daily respiratory contacts works if it’s done early and non-destructively. A hundred years ago, some rural folks in India made a habit of temporarily fanning out their population in epidemic times, and today there are options for massive temporary shelter, we can keep kids of several ages in small stable groups, and trade at a distance with phone-based networks. For unavoidable respiratory contacts, strategies for using heat and humidity in public places and having washable masks for all, together with ubiquitous appropriate-tech hand-washing, must be tested, because they will be used anyway.

Within each social group there will be an inevitable number of infections, added to and compounded with all other diseases and injuries. Every single community in the world needs real-time science for the best advice; translated video/podcast education focused on what’s frequent, severe and preventable; and generic non-patented drugs in scalable quantities.

Finally, essential life-support services need to work for all humans. This means mapping critical infrastructure for all locations and then getting what we need with what we have, not indefinitely which is the basis of sustainability, but now which is at the heart of dealing with emergencies.

A bad pandemic does not belong in the future our kids deserve, but our best response does. And guess what? Many of the issues outlined above have benefits beyond pandemic preparedness, and we already know how to do much of this stuff.

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