IN 2019, the world was blindsided by the SARS-CoV-2 virus when the little-known influenza strain began to infect and kill people in Wuhan, China. As SARS-CoV-2 spread across the globe, overwhelming entire countries, it assumed a new name: Covid-19.

By the time the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the end of the Covid-19 pandemic in May 2023, the virus had infected more than 765 million people and killed nearly 6 million.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Covid-19 left "deep scars on our world, ... erasing trillions from the GDP, disrupting travel and trade, shuttering businesses, and plunging millions into poverty."

"These scars must serve as a permanent reminder of the potential for new viruses to emerge, with devastating consequences," Tedros said.

The prospect of another pandemic unleashing havoc on a world that has not fully recovered from Covid-19 is what the UN health agency is focusing on now.

Last week, WHO raised the alarm over the spike in cases of H5N1 — the strain causing avian influenza — in mammals.

First identified at a goose farm in China in 1996, H5N1 has been detected in wildfowl species.

Between 2005 and 2021, avian flu outbreaks led to the deaths and culling of more than 300 million chickens, ducks and geese, and an unknown number of wild birds.

Parts of Europe and North America are battling the worst avian flu outbreak so far.

But what worries researchers and experts most is the spread of the virus to mammals, including domestic cattle.

They fear that with H5N1 infecting mammals, it won't be long before it evolves into a strain that is dangerous to humans.

"It means that the risk of the virus getting into more and more farm animals, and then from farm animals into humans, just gets higher and higher," according to one virologist. "Basically, we are rolling the dice with this virus."

Another WHO disease expert said that because humans have no natural immunity to H5N1, the mortality rate will be "extraordinarily high."

While the chance of human-to-human transmission of avian flu is still considered very small, its impact could be calamitous.

It has happened before. In 1918, the Spanish flu (an unfortunate misnomer because the outbreak did not originate in Spain but from a military camp in the US where American troops were training to participate in World War I) killed close to 60 million people, almost triple the fatalities from the war itself.

While there are H5N1 vaccines available, they could become ineffective as the strain continues to "reassort" or mutate.

It took months before the first Covid-19 vaccine was developed — a remarkable feat by itself, considering that coming up with a new vaccine usually takes years.

If an avian flu pandemic strikes, "it would still be a massive logistical challenge to produce vaccines at the scale and speed that will be needed," one expert said.

'Coordination, equity, solidarity'

It took a while before the WHO could set up an efficient distribution network to ship Covid vaccines to where they were needed most. Tedros has acknowledged other WHO lapses in handling Covid-19, including a lack of coordination, equity and solidarity, which "meant that existing tools and technologies were not best used to combat the virus."

"We must promise ourselves and our children and grandchildren that we will never make those mistakes again," he said.

The WHO has been making sure it will avoid similar pitfalls in facing the threat of H5N1. For a start, it has started consultations with public health agencies from Africa, China, Europe and the United States to adopt new terms for better coordination.

It is proposing replacing the terms "aerosols" and "droplets" with "infectious respiratory particles" or "IRPs" "to avoid any confusion about the size of the particles involved."

On a bigger scale, the WHO wants a stronger commitment from the international community to confronting "more complex and more frequent epidemics and pandemics."

The world was totally unprepared for Covid-19 and paid dearly for it. It will be unforgivable if we are to be blindsided for the second time.

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