Corona could be followed by worse pandemics.

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How will Corona continue?

Sign of a test center in Frankfurt am Main

Photo: Armando Babani / AFP

Shortly before the turn of the year, Germany can look to the future with a little hope.

The vaccination is finally taking place, albeit slowly and with some mishaps.

But tens of thousands have already been injected with a first dose of the agent, which promises good protection against Covid-19.

A recent poll confirmed the positive attitudes of most citizens.

A narrow majority (51 percent) are hopeful about the year 2021, showed the survey by the Foundation for Future Issues.

A look at the current infection numbers may also seem hopeful.

Apparently fewer people in Germany were infected recently.

On Friday morning the RKI announced that 22,924 new infections had been registered within 24 hours.

The previous week the value was 25,533.

But appearances are already deceptive at this point.

Less testing is currently underway, which explains why fewer new infections are registered.

According to the Association of Accredited Laboratories in Medicine (ALM), the number of tests in the Christmas week fell by around a third compared to the previous week.

And the health authorities are not working with full staff either, the reporting chains are delayed, the statistics are correspondingly distorted.

The pandemic has now occupied the world for a good year.

Corona has become a modern, global tragedy.

From a wildlife market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus was very likely to have spread to humans, it spread to the remotest corners of the world.

Corona even made it to the icy Antarctica.

Numbers took on a very special meaning in the past year.

With a daily routine, many look at statistics.

And they don't show anything good: 82 million infected people worldwide and more than 1.7 million dead.

The next year should be better.

But what can be expected?

Perhaps 2021 will be remembered as the year the world got a grip on the virus thanks to vaccinations.

But at some point we may remember a time when the world was only plagued by the comparatively harmless Sars-CoV-2.

Because worse pandemics could still come.

At the last press conference of the year, the WHO revealed a rather sad scenario.

“This pandemic was very serious.

But it's not necessarily the bad one, ”said Mark Ryan, director of the WHO emergency program.

Corona will not disappear completely.

Rather, it is to be expected that the virus will become endemic, i.e. that it will continually appear in some regions.

In other words: the world will have to learn to live with the coronavirus - this sentence has been used more often in the past year.

After all, vaccination programs can make this coexistence much easier.

But even if the vaccines are highly effective, there is no guarantee that an infectious disease will be eradicated, said Ryan.

The WHO's current goal is to first and foremost protect the weak and save lives.

It remains to be seen whether the vaccines will reduce the number of infections or prevent new infections, according to Soumya Swaminathan, a medical doctor from India and leading scientist at the WHO.

The epidemiologist David Heymann sees it that way too.

"The world has been hoping for herd immunity that transmission will somehow be reduced if enough people are immune," said the chairman of the WHO strategic and technical advisory group.

Instead, Sars-CoV-2 is more likely to join other coronaviruses that can be problematic for humans: Mers, which triggered an epidemic in 2012, or Sars-CoV, which held the world in suspense for a short time in 2002/2003.

Relaxation in early summer?

Mutations will also continue to occur.

At the moment, experts in Europe are mainly concerned with virus variants from Great Britain and South Africa, which have become known under the acronym B.1.1.7 because they could spread faster than the conventional variants.

Most recently, studies have provided indications that these changes in the genetic makeup of the viruses may not lead to worse disease courses.

Sandra Ciesek, director of the Institute for Medical Virology at the University Hospital Frankfurt, does not currently see the mutations as a major threat.

The virus could theoretically change in such a way that vaccines no longer work.

But another mutation that weakens the virus is also conceivable.

"Both are rather unlikely," said Ciesek of the German press agency.

Overall, she expects a relaxation in Germany in early summer, but with a view to the development of drugs against Covid-19, one should not expect miracles.

In her opinion, there will be no pill that is taken in case of illness and prevents severe progression in the next year.

Globally, there is a completely different risk.

Corona is one of the so-called zoonoses, pathogens that come from the animal kingdom and have passed on to humans at some point.

The list of these plagues is long: HIV, bird flu, Ebola or Creutzfeldt-Jakob, to name just a few.

And basically another zoonosis could affect humans anywhere in the world at any time.

The environmental protection organization WWF had just warned again about wildlife markets and wildlife trade and presented an investigation.

In the Southeast Asian Mekong region, there are an estimated 500 such markets in larger cities, where there is a potentially high risk of transmission of animal pathogens to humans.

"Researchers have repeatedly warned of the danger posed by zoonoses," says Alex Greenwood, head of the Wildlife Diseases Department at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, DER SPIEGEL.

The danger has long been underestimated and it is not only based on the trade in wild animals.

People and animals are moving closer together in many places.

Urbanization and population growth mean that more and more people in Africa, South America and Asia live in metropolitan areas that are close to habitats for wild animals.

At the edges, they farm and come into contact with animals more easily.

And thanks to globalization, pathogens spread at lightning speed once they have been transmitted to humans.

Corona has confirmed this more clearly than ever.

Global strategies against viruses

For example, according to Greenwood, huge poultry farms in Asia pose a threat to light transmission, where farmed and wild animals sometimes mix.

The latter transport and transmit diseases.

The exchange of new pathogens harbors dangers for changes that can also be dangerous for humans.

It is possible to take countermeasures a little by making people aware of the dangers posed by zoonoses and by making farms better isolate themselves.

But it will not be possible to completely prevent the exchange.

Experts like Greenwood see yet another approach in the fight against the spread of zoonoses.

So far, the diseases have been insufficiently researched in many regions of the world - also because the means there are not enough to apply diagnostic methods.

Therefore, the researchers have little idea of ​​the innumerable diseases in the animal kingdom that could be dangerous to humans.

"We often just don't know what happens in nature," says Greenwood.

In order to record what could happen to people and to recognize dangers in good time, systematic and global monitoring must be carried out - this is also required by the World Biodiversity Council

.

Databases and networks of researchers could help.

Individual research institutes will not be able to solve the problem, Greenwood believes.

Rather, a global strategy is needed - also to ensure long-term financing.

The WHO probably sees it that way too.

"We live in an increasingly complex, global society," said Mark Ryan.

The threats will continue.

“If there's one thing we're going to have to take out of this pandemic, with all its tragedies and losses, it's that we have to pull ourselves together.

We must honor those we have lost by getting better at what we do every day. "

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