Will the next pandemic be even worse? We find out what’s coming
No-one believes COVID-19 will be the last virus to menace the world. But what will come next and is there anything we can do to stop it?
Not everyone was blindsided by the emergence of COVID-19, certainly not Dr Amesh Adalja.
An infectious disease specialist at the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University in the US, he has spent his career trying to predict biological threats to humanity.
Two years ago, he sounded the alarm in his report, called The Characteristics of Pandemic Pathogens, which seemed to divine the rise of something akin to COVID-19 with eerie precision.
The next pandemic, he wrote, would most likely be caused by an RNA virus with animal origins. It would have a respiratory mode of spread, and it would transmit asymptomatically, causing mild illness in most people but leading to lethal pneumonias in others.
