The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by SARS-CoV-2, has produced a major global crisis, infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands throughout the world, collapsed health systems, generated social disruptions and paralyzed the global economy1. This unprecedented worldwide outbreak has consequences that are hard to predict but at least could be comparable to the 1918 influenza pandemic in terms of socio-economic and political impacts on our global society2. Societies are already adjusting to the fact that the world after the COVID-19 pandemic will be extremely different.
Scientists from multiple disciplines and public health experts have been mobilized across the globe to support policy makers and design strategies to mitigate as much as possible the impacts of COVID-19. Efforts have included the coordination and prompt release of underlying data, open discussions of different methodological approaches and sharing results to accelerate medicine and research discoveries. This inter-disciplinary and international effort is without precedent and shows that the scientific community can be rapidly mobilized to provide solutions and answers to urgent issues during global crises. Importantly, at a time of great uncertainty, many governments are unusually receptive to scientific inputs to inform evidence-based decision making, which is a positive shift in the midst of a difficult situation.
Yet, an event such as the current COVID-19 pandemic was a foregone conclusion. The rate of appearance of new emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), most of them with a wildlife origin, has increased in past decades3 and recent outbreaks including H5N14, MERS-CoV5, Zika6 and Ebola7 have previously raised concerns over their potential to cause pandemics. These outbreaks were controlled partly because their transmissibility and virulence made them more amenable to public health control measures. However, scientists and public health experts have been raising warnings for years about the potential for contagious avian influenza or coronavirus spillovers (among others)8 to become the next global pandemic 9, as they are frequently found in both domestic (e.g., pigs, cats, bovines, birds) and wild animals (e.g., bats, pangolins). They have also repeatedly shown their ability to infect humans through multiple spillover events that have led to human-to-human transmission.