The Tiny Upside To COVID-19 Is That Humanity Is Ready For An Even Deadlier Epidemic

Michael Badowski There is no consolation to the victims of COVID-19. Data means nothing to the grieving. Yet, if there is such thing as an upside to COVID,...

Michael BadowskiThere is no consolation to the victims of COVID-19. Data means nothing to the grieving.Yet, if there is such thing as an upside to COVID, it is that humans are now armed for a pandemic. So we can take a deep breath and, at last, walk tall and with optimism.Mankind, emerging from 20 months of solitude and stress, is now set for the big one. The scientists did it right. It took tremors to prepare us for a quake to come. Our team at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Biorepository was one of hundreds of research groups working on the problem. We designed test kits and used them on students, staff and visitors, while watching the work of our colleagues worldwide.Scientists around the world worked in evaluating virus sequences, developing tests, running hundreds of clinical studies, designing vaccines and deploying solutions. With no small amount of pride, I’ll remind you that we did it at light speed.We are empiricists. There is no choice. In our world, fast is good, efficient is nice, but correct is critical. Our group has produced rock-solid results with 100% data integrity. We provide data, and policy-makers then have the foundations to make policy.Whether you agree or disagree with how your school district, city or state government handled the information is secondary. The public has been exposed to the toil and brilliance of others. Simultaneously, we have witnessed the political pettiness and deceit of practitioners of pseudoscience and misinformation.Here is why I am optimistic:Scientists use many metrics to measure severity of epidemics. For example, the Spanish flu of 1918 resulted in 675,000 deaths in the US representing 0.64% of the population. COVID-19 has killed 730,000 people in the US in a country of 330 million, amounting to 0.22% of the population. The 1918 flu was three times more deadly to the population than COVID-19.What is more telling is the “case fatality rate” that measures how deadly is a disease among only the people infected. It’s estimated that 500 million people were infected during the 1918 pandemic and 50 million of them died. That give us an astounding 10% case fatality rate compared to COVID, at approximately 2%.Ebola, SARS and MERS were also far more deadly among those infected than COVID. Thankfully, these did not reach pandemic numbers. However, history has shown us widespread disease coupled with high case fatality rate is still possible. The Black Death and the Justinian Plague are examples.Once mankind grasped what it was up against with COVID, we rose to the occasion and created a master defense strategy for what it is a certainty to come.When will it come? Where will it originate? We have no idea, of course, but history has been cruel and regular. The moment will come.Among those who understand that threat: Bill Gates.It was only six years ago that, in a celebrated TED Talk, Gates warned us, “not missiles, but microbes,” pose the greatest threat to humanity. “We’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic,” he said. “We’re not ready for the next.”What a difference 2,000 days can make. This upbeat assessment has its origin in the quick, responsible work of scientists in China who, within eight days of reviewing the first COVID-19 cases, were making public the sequence of the virus’s genome. Such early disclosure paved the way for investigators on every continent to create their own paths as to how to treat the infected and, more importantly, to work on vaccines. Politics, of course, stalked investigators at every turn.Still, whilst posturers and know-nothings practiced brinkmanship, the nucleus of the world’s well-educated biologists, pharmacologists, immunologists and public health professionals put on blinders and earplugs and did what science has taught them: research.What they turned up is a multifaceted solution that should make proud residents of all seven continents. The West and its celebrated democracies? They went about solving COVID-19, a single-stranded RNA (ribonucleic acid molecules) virus through a costly, high-tech, single-stranded mRNA approach. The east? A 2,300-year-old regime in China went another direction, using older, tried-and-true “killed-virus” technology.What followed for a year was similar to a college-engineering trouble-shooting competition on a global scale. Said and done, the world has emerged with a plethora of solutions offered quickly to the masses.All of this was, it turns out, for what we now know to be the seventh coronavirus. The first four were, essentially, common colds. The fifth, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) differed, and the sixth, MERS, (Middle East respiratory syndrome), found in 2012, was new to humans. A good vaccine would reduce this seventh coronavirus to the level of its four predecessors and make it, essentially, a common cold virus.In comparison to the plagues of recorded history, COVID-19 will be deemed benign. Yet, the unknowns — the fear that COVID-19 would be graver — gave society a fire drill of the highest magnitude.Is there a chance there will be more unity, more science and less political posturing as a part of our next challenge?Will societies as disparate as China, Argentina, France and the US be inclined to work together or pursue solutions apart? Will governments be inclined, again, to permit shortcuts and lessen liabilities in the interest of exigency?We can only hope so.It should be noted that the real hero in the vaccine efficacy story is not the scientist but the patient’s own immune system. The human immune system is an amazing piece of machinery. A billion years of evolution has built a system that recognizes when the body is being attacked and handles cellular challenges by the millions that are never recognized by you.Gates let us know how woefully unprepared we were in 2015. His prescription at that point: “We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are. The last time a germ game was done in the United States was back in 2001, and it didn’t go so well. So far, the score is, Germs: 1, People: 0.”The world is a changed place. Six years and one pandemic later, I’d say the score is now tied, Germs 1, People 1.”(Michael Badowski an associate research scientist at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Biorepository.)