COVID had a low mortality rate and still killed millions. More lethal pandemics are possible and risk extinction

Historically, Pandemics have had a decimating impact upon human civilisation. For example, the bubonic plague killed an estimated 30-60% of the European medieval population, with cities and urban populations mainly being affected. Whilst a devastating 90% of the indigenous populations died following colonisation, of which the main cause was due to a previously uninfected population being exposed to measles, smallpox and influenza for the first time. Even in the 20th Century smallpox killed an estimated 100 million people around the world before it was totally eliminated in 1980; (Oldstone M, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has had a fatality rate of approximately 3% of those infected-a similar rate to the Spanish flu, whilst in comparison the mortality rate from Ebola was approximately 50%. The devasting impact of pandemics have altered the course of history and shaped our current geo-political landscape. The recent experience of COVID-19 with a relatively low mortality rate, reveals how disruptive pandemics are to human civilisation-even without the risk of decimating the human population.

Existential risks exist from pandemics that are allowed to spread widely, with new mutations emerging. A particular threat is from the increasing development of synthetic biology and 'gain of function' research, whereby infections are genetically engineered to enhance their lethality for research or for the purposes of biological warfare. The potential existential risks from engineering future pandemics are of particular concern, especially as the technology becomes increasingly available, combined with very variable and absent governance mechanisms. The widescale and rapid spread of the COVID-19 Pandemic revealed how unprepared individual countries and the global community were for dealing with an infection with relatively low fatality rates, and calls into question our current capacity and collective ability to deal with a more lethal pandemic in the future; (IAC, 2022).