Pandemics Last for Over Three Years

Photo by Zach Vessels on Unsplash

I drafted this in June 2020. I also told people I spoke to about this. People were reluctant to believe me. Some thought I was nuts for saying this, some called me pessimistic. Eventually I decided against publishing this post. But now, in the second half of 2022, I finally feel like I can go ahead and post this. I very much doubt anyone's going to dismiss it now. I shouldn't have cared in the first place, but hey, you live and learn.

Anyway, here's why I thought this pandemic would last for at least three years. 

Because through history, we've had pandemic every 100 years on average, and they've all lasted over three years on average.

Assuming a start year of 2019 for the following:

COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, has been around since December 2019, and has infected over 616 million people worldwide (as of September 2022).

101 years ago, there was the Spanish Flu that lasted from February 1918 to April 1920, around 25 months, or a little over two years. It affected 500 million people worldwide, which was one-third of the planet's population at the time. There was no cure found, and over time, the infected developed an immunity to that novel strand of the virus, and things went "back to normal" by the 1920s. It kept mutating, and some researchers believe that it was never fully eradicated, but just mutated into the flu we battle seasonally even today.

202 years ago, there was a Cholera outbreak that lasted from 1817 to 1824, so around 7 years! Affecting 1-2 million people in India alone, and that was just the first one. There were multiple outbreaks across the world for many years after, of varying severity. It only reduced after a long process and many years of research that culminated in the invention and distribution of glucose-based Oral Rehydration Salts/Solutions (ORS), recommended by the WHO even today - not just for cholera, but any illnesses that cause dehydration.

Around 300 years ago during the 18th century, there was a smallpox epidemic spread through the globe at various times. It's debatable whether it can be called a pandemic since it wasn't entirely simultaneous, but I'll defer to people more learned in the field here. I don't claim to know much about categorization but nevertheless, smallpox was a very big problem. Affecting people in Europe, Asia and Africa, it took a huge toll on the populations. In Europe, 400,000 people were killed every year, and Japan saw a drastic population decrease. Even after that, smallpox continued to affect people globally and set off epidemics in certain areas. The Franco-Prussian war triggered another round of infections from 1870-1875 claiming 500,000 lives. In India alone there were 4.7 million deaths from smallpox between 1868 and 1907. Edward Jenner first successfully created the smallpox vaccine in 1796, but clearly it took a while to be mass produced and available and/or accessible globally.

There were more, with varying time-spans, but none shorter than 2 years, and many much longer.

You get my drift.

So when I told this to people, many responses mentioned the current medical system being much more evolved than it was 100 or 200 years ago.

For one, the medical system, 100 years ago was also more evolved than the one 200 years ago, which did absolutely nothing to shorten the severity or spread of the pandemic in 1918 as compared to the one in 1817. Secondly, even though the medical system may be much better now, the kind of travel that happens nowadays is also much more evolved. If anything, pandemics took more time to spread on a wide scale due to travel being mostly by land or ship. Now with the proliferation of commercial flight, it was quicker than ever to transmit the virus across the world at an unbelievable speed.

So the advances in medicine were - to greatly simplify this - essentially nullified by the advances in transportation.

At this point, of course, quite a few people were dismissive. Remember, this was mid 2020. Nobody wanted to consider this. I also had a few people suggest that even if this was true, our researchers would certainly be able to come up with a solution in no time.

Researchers are not magic people who pull solutions out of their hats. It requires a lot of effort, a lot of double blind tests, and a lot of trial and error; just because something is affecting a lot of people does not mean it becomes any easier to work on it. Even if a lot of resources are given to the people working on this, and even if more people are allocated to prioritize this project, there's only so much they can do in a particular span of time. They're only human. If anything, these people are under a lot of global pressure to try and develop a vaccine. It isn't easy or simple or quick.

Even when they do manage to come up with a cure, the sheer scale of manufacturing something for billions of people around the world is another huge deal. It's unlikely that this is a task that can be done in a few weeks.

And of course there were people who believed that the coronavirus would just go away in its own, optimistically putting it in the same bracket as the rhinovirus that causes the common cold. This is not worth discussing, and certainly not in 2022, where we are only just starting to understand the effects of long COVID. We're still not certain of where these effects stop and end, and lots of people have many different experiences with it, from anosmia to brain fog.

As we are now in the latter part of the year, it's safe to say the three years of my estimation are drawing to a close. Even with its many variants and mutations over the past years, I anticipate that it will follow the same pattern of previous pandemics and we'll be done with it - hopefully soon. Here's to a pandemic free world, for at least the next 100 years.