Then, there is a more often repeated phrase, "This is a once-in-a-hundred-years event." These are well-meaning politicians and news people who relate our current coronavirus experience with the 1918 flu pandemic that swept over the United States and indeed the world. It is an apt analogy, except for the time frame they put to the two events. Just because it has been 102 years between events does not mean it will be another 100 years before we have another.
I expect that my grandchildren will likely experience at least one more significant pandemic in their lifetimes. I say this because of two factors. One is the interface between humans and animals that is happening now on a broader scale than ever before. Then there is the fact that what happens in Africa matters to Peoria, Ill. International travel that is available to all but the most humble of financial means, is mixing people, cultures and diseases.
It was the United States' entry into World War I and the shipment of many thousands of men in close quarters to the European theater to fight, that exported the disease to those places and then around the world. Today is is modern air travel that is the conduit for disease via human carriers.
We have never been more connected and more vulnerable to a worldwide pandemic. Just as we an have successive years of "100 year floods," we can expect that the timeline until our next pandemic is bounded by the happenstance of the two most prominent pandemics in modern times being juxtaposed to each other, as somehow setting an expectation for what our future timeline for a disease outbreak should be.
