‘Covid-19-like pandemic may hit within next 60 years’

The world will likely see a pandemic similar to Covid-19 within the next 60 years, say researchers stressing the need to prioritise efforts to prevent and control them.

Researchers from the Universities of Padua in Italy and Duke in the US used new statistical methods to measure the scale and frequency of disease outbreaks including a row of pathogens like plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus, and novel influenza viruses over the past 400 years to estimate the intensity of those events and the yearly probability of them recurring.

The findings showed that the probability of a pandemic similar to the deadliest pandemic in modern history — the Spanish flu, which killed more than 30 million people between 1918 and 1920 — ranged from 0.3 per cent to 1.9 per cent per year over the time period studied.

These figures also mean it is statistically likely that a pandemic of such extreme scale would occur within the next 400 years.

But the data, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed the risk of intense outbreaks is growing rapidly.

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