The Next Pandemic Is On Its Way — And It’s Going To Be Much Worse
Why We Should Be Deeply Concerned About What Covid Will Turn Into
umair haque
umair haque
Dec 11 

This is going to be a scary post. It’s going to be hard to read, but we need to talk about it, because it’s important.

I know, I hate it when people say that, too.

How much trouble are we in at this juncture in human history? I want to focus for a moment not on the big picture — climate change, ecological collapse, fascism resurgent, a great dying — but just one facet of it: pandemic. What could Covid become? What is it likely to turn into? The more that I think about it, the more troubling the answers to those questions become.

Epidemiologists and virologists will tell you that “we got lucky.” They’re right — but only half right. What they mean is that it could have been much worse. Why? Because Covid has about a 2% mortality rate. I’m spending the year in America. Americans are the most selfish and irresponsible people I have ever been around — ever. I’ve lived all over the world. Americans? They barely wear masks, don’t distance, don’t care. They are ungrateful and ungracious, crude and cruel. They don’t understand how “lucky” they really got.

What do I — and epidemiologists — mean by that? Covid is part of a trend. It was preceded by SARS and MERS. They were both respiratory pandemics — on smaller scales. But they are far worse diseases than Covid. How much worse? Covid’s mortality rate is 2%.

SARS’ mortality rate is about 14–15%. For older people and vulnerable groups, it’s 50%.

MERS’ mortality rate is between 30 and 40%. For older people and vulnerable groups, it’s north of 65%.

So far, about 5 million people are dead of Covid. Are you beginning to shudder a little bit? Surely you’re beginning to connect the dots.

If it had been SARS or MERS, that number — 5 million? At a 2% mortality rate? It would have been closer to 50 million. At SARS’ mortality rate. It would have been 100 million at MERS’ mortality rate.

Now, if you’re a dumb, smug American, you’re going to laugh: “But it’s not SARS and MERS!! Ha!”

You’re right. But you’re also very, very wrong. Because the question, again, is: what is Covid likely to become?

And here I some very, very bad news.

SARS is a Coronavirus.

MERS is a Coronavirus.

Shuddering even more? You should be. If you haven’t connected the dots, then let me explain.

Covid’s now everywhere. It’s in billions of human bodies. Breeding away. Mutating. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle. And between viruses, there is a thing called gene flow. Genes cross over. They are more like rivers than mountains. Gene flow is harder between disparate kinds of viruses. But between viruses of the same family? Gene flow is liquid. It happens faster, harder, and swifter.

At least that’s my reading of the science — if you’re an epidemiologist, feel free to correct me. Or back me up, if that’s the case.

So here we have an incredibly disturbing scenario unfolding before us.

Right about now, you probably think the future of Covid is something like Alpha, Delta, Omicron. The trend is more infectious — but less severe — variants. That’s true — but it’s only half the picture. Yes, standard epidemiology says that during pandemics, viruses eventually evolve to be less severe and more infectious.

But we are talking about the next pandemic.

This one has already crippled the world — and it’s going to do so likely for the rest of this decade. Still, as the epidemiologists say, we got lucky. Now you are beginning to see what they meant.

Let me try and summarise that.

Covid is likely to mutate in two directions. For the rest of this pandemic, yes, hopefully it’ll get less severe and more infectious, and eventually resemble something like a cold, only still much worse. Here’s a story of a kid who got Covid — a perfectly healthy one — and died of a stroke. It’s never going to be just a cold.

But it’s the next pandemic we should now begin to be very, very concerned about. Because the scenario I’ve outlined above appears to me to be just a matter of time. Covid is part of a family of viruses. There is gene flow among them. Covid is the least severe of these viruses. SARS and MERS have 10 to 20 times the mortality rate of Covid. They are seriously, seriously scary diseases.

But because they’re all in the same family, it’s almost inevitable that at some point, Covid/SARS/MERS mutants begin to emerge. That means: viruses with the infectiousness of Covid, but the mortality rates of SARS and MERS.

Why did we get “lucky” with Covid? Well, it’s because SARS and MERS have much lower Rs — the measure of how infectious a virus is.

For MERS, the R is less than 1.

For SARS, it’s about 1.7

For Delta, the R is between 5 and 9.

For Omicron, the R is estimated to be more than double that.

Now you should really be shuddering. If you’re not, let me unpack that for you. “The R is the expected number of cases directly generated by one case in a population.”

That means: with MERS, one infected person gave the virus to one other one. With SARS, one infected person transmitted the virus to two more people. With Delta, one infected person transmitted the virus to five to ten people. And with Omicron, it’s probably ten to twenty people infected by one person.

In other words, SARS and MERS didn’t spread fast and wide because their Rs weren’t that high. The R of MERS is low because the virus wasn’t airborne. But if MERS recombines with COVID-19 and goes airborne, then the results will be cataclysmic. Not to mention, there were decent containment efforts — and we weren’t fighting a virus as infectious as Covid when it came to SARS and MERS.

But what happens when — not if but when — there’s a Coronavirus that’s a SARS/MERS/Covid cross strain? Then we are in for very, very serious trouble.

We are then talking about a virus with the following statistics. A mortality rate of up to 40%, with an R of up to 20.

That’s a horrific possibility to even consider.

Let’s just take the intermediate case: A Covid/SARS strain. It has SARS’ mortality rate of 15% or so, with Delta’s R of between 5 to 10. That means that one infected person is giving the virus to five to ten more people. Only this virus isn’t killing 2% of the infected, like Covid, it’s killing 15% of them.

Let’s use America as an example to make concrete how bad that really is. A million people or so are already dead of Covid — officially. At 2% mortality, in a couple of years. Now we’re talking about seven and a half times as many — 7.5 million — much, much faster. Alpha’s R was about 2 — the first year or two’s main Covid variant. At a higher R, we’re approaching ten million dead in certainly less than a year, in a matter of months, between 3 to 6 months.

That’s not even the bad case. The bad case? It’s a Covid/MERS variant. This one has MERS’ mortality rate of up to 40%. We don’t even need to assume Omicron’s crazily high R of ten to twenty to get to a nightmare — just Delta’s five to ten. One person gives COVID/MERS to five to ten more. But 40% of them die.

The one million people in America already dead of Covid? Now it’s become 20 million. In three to six months. And it doesn’t stop. It just keeps going, until there are vaccines, and even then, with such a high mortality rate, who wants to risk getting it at all?

Pandemics like these are civilisation killers.

I’m not kidding about Coronaviruses recombining. If anything, according to scientists, the coronavirus is a master of mixing its genome. In fact, recombination among coronaviruses already occurred: “Dr. Munster and his collaborators suggested that recombination is likely how both SARS-CoV-2 and the virus behind the original SARS outbreak in 2003 both ended up with a version of the spike protein that allows them to deftly enter human cells.” The conclusion that seems to be emerging is: “related coronaviruses are quite promiscuous in terms of recombining with each other.”

We think that Covid ground society to a halt — and it did, but only in a little way. Sure, we were locked down at home for a while, and now the sane among us wear masks and distance still, and so forth. But that’s nothing. We could still get food and water and basic goods and so forth. But a pandemic with an R of ten, and a mortality rate of 10%? Forget it. Society simply stops functioning completely.

Everything stops. Nobody goes anywhere. Nations close off, for good. Healthcare systems? Forget it. There’s a mass grave in every town. It’s worse than a World War — it’s like five of them at once. And nobody knows what to do.

The fascists, in the vacuum, probably seize power, preying on people’s panic and fear, which is easily turned into hate and rage.

Let me say it again.

Pandemics like these are civilisation killers.

But that is what’s on the cards, as far as I can see.

The next pandemic is on its way. Covid was the least bad one — by a long, long way. And the point isn’t that “well, at least it wasn’t that horrible killer disease.” The point is much, much more disturbing than that. It’s that Covid comes from a family of viruses — Coronaviruses — which were rising across the globe. And the worst of them were genuinely nightmarish killers, diseases with incredibly high mortality rates.

But because Covid is in that family, and Covid is now everywhere, breeding, mutating, spreading, it’s more or less inevitable now that genes will flow, and that Covid will inherit the lethal powers of a SARS or MERS. And retain the infectiousness of it’s own variants. That means a whole new strain of Coronaviruses — Covid/SARS, Covid/MERS, all the ones in between.

That’s the next pandemic. And the worst news of all is that it’s not far away. How long will it take a COVID/MERS or COVID/SARS strain to emerge? Not very long, because Covid is everywhere, mutating away. It’ll take just one — at best a handful — of immunocompromised people with Covid, and some form of SARS or MERS — and bang!

How long will it take? Maybe a decade. Maybe two, if we’re very, very lucky. If we’re unlucky, it could happen tomorrow. The clock is ticking.

We should be learning the lesson. But are we?

This is the warm-up, my friends. The next one is going to be a civilisation killer.

Go ahead and think about it for yourself. Read everything I’ve written here. Reflect on it carefully. I’ve been discussing it with my lovely wife, the doctor, and her friends — doctors, scientists — and the more we think about it, the more horrified we get. This isn’t science fiction and it’s not a scare story. This is just basic logic and science and reason.

Let me close with this thought. It doesn’t have to be this way. We could be vaccinating the world. It would cost a fraction of what one Jeff Bezos is worth. A tiny, tiny fraction of GDP. That way, we would stop the next pandemic, the one that isn’t about Covid, but what Covid becomes, which is a far, far deadlier strain of Coronavirus altogether. It’s inevitable that Covid will become that, in the end.

But we aren’t protecting ourselves by vaccinating the world. I look around at the Americans at my little cafe. Dumb, glib, clueless. No masks. No distancing. Not a care in the world. The most selfish and ignorant people ever to live. They don’t care about anything.

I look at them, and I know a terrible truth. Covid/MERS, when it arrives, is going to mow them down like wheat in the field.

I wonder if they’ll care then. When they wonder: why didn’t we eliminate Covid when we had the chance, before it turned into a civilisation killer?

Or maybe they won’t care even then. The question, then, is: do you?

Umair
December 2021