Are we facing crisis upon crisis? Cooperation is more than ever a must to face the challenges of today and tomorrow

Abstract

The years 2020 and 2021 will, without doubt, be remembered as corona virus years, but also as the years that everything changed. Today we think that we conquered the coronavirus, but isn’t it more realistic to believe that we have partial control over the virus through the vaccination process? Notwithstanding the vaccination, on the 4th of October 2022 amounted worldwide the number of new cases in the last 24 hours still 200,000, and new variants, some of them more lethal, appear around the corner. What is true is that in a relatively short period the medical and pharmaceutical sector was able to develop adequate vaccines to heal the infected people and to control the spreading of the disease, and this in sharp contrast with the combat of the Spanish flu in 1918. At that moment there were no vaccines to protect against influenza infection and no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections that could be associated with influenza infections. Control efforts worldwide were limited to nonpharmaceutical interventions such as isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, etc. In total, 500 million people became infected by the Spanish flu virus, and the number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide. The coronavirus statistics reveal that on the 1st of October 2022 worldwide 621 million people had been infected and 6.56 million lost their lives. At the outbreak of the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 amounted the world population to 1.8 billion and 7.75 billion in 2020 when the world was confronted with the coronavirus, in other words, 2.78% of the world's population died from the Spanish flu, while only 0.085% died during the corona pandemic. Despite the enormous health, economic and social impact of both pandemics, this concise overview shows the enormous benefit of the scientific progress between 1918 and 2020, because thanks to the advancements in the health sector the world percentage of deaths in 2022 was 30 times lower than in 1918.