NIt was easy to predict the further course of the pandemic. In the meantime, however, even experienced modelers have had to capitulate in view of the growing number of unknown parameters. “Regarding Covid, there hasn’t been much to say from my side lately, because we can’t make any precise predictions at the moment,” Viola Priesemann, a modeler from Göttingen, recently reported on Twitter. The impact of the upcoming easing is too unpredictable, just like the existing immunity of the population against the omicron variant BA.2.
In fact, it is interesting to follow how much the challenges and questions for the modelers have changed since the beginning of the pandemic: First, the general properties of the new corona virus – such as its basic reproduction number or the serial interval – had to be derived using models from the available data . The next step was the effectiveness of the various measures and the relevant infection routes and contexts, before finally the influence of the vaccination campaigns and the different virus variants had to be integrated into the models – and made them increasingly complex.
The journal Science recently had American researchers trace the pandemic again from the perspective of epidemiological modelers. The conclusion of the scientists: Over the past few years, more and more general assumptions about the virus have been replaced by empirical knowledge in the models. At the same time, a point has now been reached at which longer-term forecasts are made more difficult by the emergence of new variants and the waning immunity of the population over time, and hopes of the possibility of even better control of the infection process are dampened.
How many deaths are acceptable?
Rather, the question now is how our life with the virus should look like in the future – options for this are discussed in another overview article in “Science” with regard to the future vaccination strategy. In those countries with a high vaccination rate, it has already been possible to decouple the number of infections from hospitalizations and the number of deaths. But now it has to be decided whether that’s enough for us: If the current situation in Great Britain, for example, is extrapolated, one still has to reckon with around 50,000 additional deaths per year there, in the USA it would be around 400,000. Is that a balance sheet that we want to accept permanently? Even if long-Covid patients are taken into account? And if not, what should be a viable vaccination strategy for the future, adjusted to the regular emergence of new variants? Is it realistic to develop vaccines adapted to new variants, or should research focus on broad-spectrum vaccines?
In any case, the current pandemic must be understood as a call to prepare yourself better for the future, American and Canadian scientists warn in another “Science” article. SARS-CoV-2 was by no means an endurance test. The virus has a relatively stable genome and shares many characteristics with SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV. In particular when it comes to developing vaccines and medicines, it was therefore possible to fall back on a lot that already existed in preparation – and yet there have already been more than six million deaths worldwide: “We have to be much better prepared for the next pandemic.”