The lessons of Covid-19
Graves prepared for victims of Covid-19 at a cemetery in São Paulo in August. Brazil has recorded more than 155,000 Covid-19 deaths © Jonne Roriz/Bloomberg
In assessing whether the world could have been spared the Covid-19 pandemic, it is helpful to consider the question in two parts. First, how prepared were societies for the almost inevitable emergence of a disease against which humans had zero immunity? And second, how did they handle it once it actually struck? Those fighting infectious diseases had for decades been warning about the risks of a pandemic. It was dangerous to pigeonhole pathogens as “tropical diseases” in an era of jet travel when microbes could hitch a ride to anywhere on earth, they say. “I think that, in the mindset of the west, it was always a threat that was for the developing world, especially for Africa,” says Mr Nkengasong. “The characterisation of ‘tropical medicine’ meant ‘these people in Africa or the tropics’, which were considered a ‘museum of diseases’.”
In 1981, Richard Krause, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told the US Congress: “Plagues are as certain as death and taxes.” Jonathan Mann, a pioneer of HIV research in the 1980s, wrote that Aids was trying to teach humanity “that a health problem in any part of the world can rapidly become a health problem to many or all”. The world desperately needed a worldwide “early-warning system” to detect the eruption of new diseases. Without it, he warned, “we are essentially defenceless”.