Tucson Opinion: Upside to COVID-19: We're prepared for the real thing

Yet, if there is such thing as an “upside,” to a pandemic, we are now able to take a deep-breath and, at last, walk tall and with optimism.

Mankind, emerging from 20-months of solitude and strife, is now set for the big one. The scientists did it right. It took tremors to prepare us for a quake-to-come.

Our team at University of Arizona Health Sciences Biorepository was one of hundreds designing test-kits and using them on students, staff and visitors, and watching the work of our colleagues worldwide.

We worked in evaluating virus sequences, developing tests, running hundreds of clinical studies, designing vaccines, and deploying solutions. With no small amount of pride I’ll remind you that we did it at light speed.

Whether you agree or disagree with how your school district, city or state government handled the information is secondary. We have been exposed to the toil and brilliance of others. Simultaneously, we have witnessed the political pettiness and deceit of practitioners of pseudo-science and misinformation.

Here is why I am optimistic:

Scientists use “case fatality rate” to measure deaths per number of reported cases. That means the Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed six in every 1,000 people, was four times more lethal than COVID-19, whose 500,000 deaths represented about 0.15 percent of our population. Ebola, MERS, SARS and Avian influenza, which did not have the penetration or absolute numbers of infected, were dramatically higher per capita. The same goes for Black Death and Justinian Plague.

Once mankind grasped what it was up against, we rose to the occasion and created a master defense-strategy for what it is a certainty to come.

When will it come? Where will it originate? We have no idea, of course, but history has been a cruel and regular. The moment will come.

Among those who understand that threat: Bill Gates.

It was only six years ago that, in a celebrated TED Talk, Gates warned us, “not missiles, but microbes,” pose the greatest threat to humanity. “(W)e’ve actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic,” he said. “We’re not ready for the next…”

While countries prepared for their futures by waging war-games, and while NATO prepared rapid-deployment militias to far-off lands, the more sinister foe was biological, Gates maintained.

All I can say is, “Well, what a difference two thousand days can make.”

This upbeat assessment has its origin in the quick, responsible work of scientists in China who, within eight days of reviewing the first COVID-19 cases, were making public the sequence of the virus’s genome. Such early disclosure paved the way for investigators on every continent to create their own paths as how to treat the infected and, more importantly, to work on vaccines.

What they turned up, as we see today, is a multi-faceted solution that should make proud residents of all seven continents.

The West and its celebrated democracies? They went about solving COVID-19, a single-stranded RNA (ribonucleic acid molecules) virus through a costly, high-tech, single-stranded mRNA approach.

The Far East? A 2,300-year-old authoritarian regime in China went another direction, using older, tried-and-true “killed-virus” technology.

What followed for a year was similar to a college-engineering or high-school automotive trouble-shooting competition on a global scale. Said and done, the world has emerged with a plethora of solutions offered quickly to the masses.

All of this was, it turns out, for what we now know to be the seventh coronavirus. The first four, of course, were essentially, common colds. The fifth, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) differed, and the sixth, MERS, (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), found in 2012, was a respiratory illness new to humans. A good vaccine would reduce this seventh coronavirus to its four predecessors and make it, essentially, a common cold virus.

It should be noted that the real hero in the vaccine efficacy story is not the scientist but the patient’s own immune system. One needs to understand that the human immune system is an amazing piece of machinery. A billion years of evolution has built a system that recognizes when the body is being attacked.

It only took Bill Gates eight minutes to let us know how woefully unprepared we were in 2015. There was no need to panic, he told us. “We don’t have to hoard cans of spaghetti or go down into the basement. But we need to get going because time is not on our side.”

His prescription at that point: “We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are. The last time a germ game was done in the United States was back in 2001, and it didn’t go so well. So far, the score is, Germs: 1, People: 0.”

I would submit that, by design or by default, the world is a changed place. Six years and one pandemic later, I’d say we’ve awoken — and the score is now tied, Germs 1, People 1.”