Michael McGuire: In the same way World War I wasn’t the war to end all wars, neither will COVID-19 be the last pandemic

Michael McGuire: In the same way World War I wasn’t the “war to end all wars”, neither will COVID-19 be the last global pandemic for another 100 years.

The vaccine is here. How exciting. Roll up your sleeves. We’re all saved. Sure, the government of old Slo-Mo has taken an inordinate time to start the vaccination process.

Just the 100 and something countries started before us. (And you have to wonder how many national leaders put on national dress to mark the occasion.) But that’s not important right now. The important thing is the vaccine is here now and we are now full speed along the long road back to normal.

At least until the next mysterious virus comes roaring around the corner to wipe us all out.

Politicians of all stripes have often referred to the COVID-19 pandemic as a “once-in-a-century” occurrence. Presumably, taking their cue from the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and doing some basic (even for politicians) mathematics. But, in the same way World War I wasn’t the “war to end all wars”, neither will COVID-19 be the last global pandemic for another 100 years.

In some ways, we have been lucky it took this long for such a global phenomenon to arrive. There have been plenty of near misses and warning signs in the past couple of decades. We’ve had avian flu, swine flu, Middle East respiratory system (MERS), which came from camels, sudden acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which like COVID-19, started in China, and the frankly terrifying Ebola.

And the even worse news is that the next pandemic will likely be more virulent and deadly than this one.

The difficulty will be in predicting where and when it will strike. According to some predictions, about 75 per cent of newly emerging diseases are zoonotic. That is, they are transmitted from animals to humans, which is how we landed in the present situation. The most likely source of COVID-19 is still thought to be a market in Wuhan, China.

A policeman watching over a civet cat captured in the wild by a farmer in Wuhan, in central China's Hubei province. Picture: Dan Martin

Last year, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) put out a report that estimated there are 1.7 million “undiscovered” viruses in mammals and birds, of which 827,000 could infect humans. The body said the cause of COVID-19 was “no great mystery”.

“The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive pandemic risk through their impacts on our environment,’’ the panel’s chair, Dr Peter Daszak, said.

“Changes in the way we use land, unsustainable trade, production and consumption disrupt nature and increase contact between wildlife, livestock, pathogens and people.’’

The upshot is that reducing habitat for wildlife, and reducing biodiversity, increases the chances that humans and animals and potentially deadly viruses intersect.

The theory is that when humanity engages in wholesale destruction of forests, we also destroy many species of animals along the way.

The animals that tend to survive are the ones that feel comfortable in the human world. You know, animals such as bats and rats. Bats are still a prime suspect in creating the current pandemic.

Look, it’s great we have a vaccine.

But pandemics definitely fall into the cliche of prevention being better than the cure.

There are scientists and programs all over the world that have been setting up early-warning systems to try to stop the next pandemic. This could be setting up surveillance systems in known virus hotspots, or it could be something as simple as keeping a watch out for falling chicken prices in regional markets as a potential precursor of avian flu.

On a bigger scale, more needs to be done to preserve habitat and biological diversity.

One of the lessons from the current epidemic is that when a potential outbreak is spotted, we must move much quicker to contain it.

Such is the connectivity of the world that once a virus escapes, it becomes impossible to contain. That could mean faster border closures, travel restrictions, social distancing and a ramping up of testing – all the measures we have come so used to in the past year.

Even so, more pandemics feel inevitable. It’s just to be hoped we are better prepared for the next one than we were for the current one.