Berlin.
Virologist Christian Drosten expects new pandemics to come after Corona. Why Mers is now at the top of the list.
The Berlin virologist Christian Drosten warns of one Pandemic with the Mers virus. The pathogen, which can be transmitted via the air we breathe, is widespread in dromedary camels in the Middle East and has many opportunities to adapt to humans, Drosten told this editorial team. “My concern is that this will create a variant that can lead to a global pandemic.” It is not possible to reliably predict what the specific impact will be today.
drosten countered the assumption that every third Mers infection is fatal. “The virus has not been researched well enough to be able to say for sure,” said the director of the Institute of Virology at the Charité. “One often only sees the severe cases and overlooks the mild ones. I suspect the true mortality is more in the SARS-CoV-2 range.”
When asked how likely a pandemic with a significantly more deadly virus was, Drosten replied: “If somewhere Virus would appear, which is transmissible like SARS-CoV-2, but has a mortality rate of ten percent, then it would immediately paralyze all public life. What was happening would be so striking and so horrific that there would be no discussion at all of the need to stop it. Even before a worldwide distribution.”
Drosten: New infectious diseases will definitely come
It can be said with certainty that after the Corona-pandemics there will be new infectious diseases “and that some can also lead to pandemics,” emphasized Drosten. “However, a pandemic does not automatically mean tough measures such as lockdowns. The last official major pandemic before Corona was in 2009 with the H1N1 virus, which some called swine flu at the time. A lot of people didn’t even notice that.”
Drosten reiterated that the corona pandemic was “over” for him. “There may be another increase in the number of infections in winter, but that will probably not lead to a sharp increase in hospital cases,” he said. “Nobody can say what will be in five years, but I would be very surprised if again variants surfaced, leading again to the severe courses we saw at the peak of the pandemic.”
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