Because COVID-19 has become a recurring and recognizable health issue, healthcare workers in the United Kingdom are now preparing for a possible new pandemic known as “Disease X.” Healthcare specialists have warned that the new virus could be as deadly as the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920.
After the World Health Organization established the moniker “Disease X,” health experts are now raising the alarm. Experts have warned that this potential new pandemic might kill 20 times more people than the coronavirus. The globe witnessed the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, which cruelly claimed the lives of over 2.5 million individuals globally.
Kate Bingham, who chaired the UK’s Vaccine Taskforce from May to December 2020, told the Daily Mail that she feared Disease X might be far more dangerous than COVID-19.
Disease X has the potential to kill 50 million people
Experts predict that Disease X has the potential to kill about 50 million people. “Let me put it this way: the 1918-19 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, twice as many as were killed in World War I. Today, we could expect a similar death toll from one of the many viruses that already exist,” she said while speaking to the Daily Mail.
Speaking about Disease X, Bingham emphasized that “the world will have to prepare for mass vaccination drives and deliver the doses in record time.”
She claimed that, while scientists identified 25 virus families including thousands of individual viruses, she believes that experts still need to discover millions of viruses, that have the potential to grow into pandemics.
“In a sense, we got lucky with COVID-19, despite the fact that it caused 20 million or more deaths across the world. The point is that the vast majority of people infected with the virus managed to recover. Imagine Disease X is as infectious as measles with the fatality rate of Ebola [67%]. Somewhere in the world, it’s replicating, and sooner or later, somebody will start feeling sick,” Bingham said.
Urbanization and habitat destruction amplifying disease outbreak
The rise in outbreaks can be related to a growing tendency of more individuals to congregate in metropolitan settings according to Bingham. She also emphasized that the growth has occurred as a result of the annual destruction of millions of acres of natural habitat.
“This reason is particularly important because around three-quarters of emerging infectious diseases originate in animals and then leap from species to species until they can, in certain circumstances, infect human beings,” she said.
One of the first steps, she says, is to assign the appropriate financial resources, which essentially involves putting “the money on the table.” “The financial cost of inaction is seismic.” “After all, even Covid-19, a milder virus than Disease X, managed to cost us $16 trillion in lost output and public health expenditure,” Bingham explained.