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Berlin (dts news agency) – The Berlin virologist Christian Drosten has expressed concern about the spread of the Mers virus. The airborne virus is widespread in dromedary camels in the Middle East and has many opportunities to adapt to humans, Drosten told the newspapers of the Funke media group (Saturday editions).
“My concern is that this will create a variant that could lead to a global pandemic.” What effect this will have in concrete terms cannot be reliably predicted today. Drosten countered the assumption that every third Mers infection was fatal. “The virus has not been researched well enough to be able to say for sure,” said the director of the Institute of Virology at the Charité. “You often only see the severe cases and overlook the mild ones. I suspect that the true mortality rate is more in the SARS-CoV-2 range.” When asked how likely a pandemic with a much more deadly virus was, Drosten replied: “If a virus appeared somewhere that is transmissible like SARS-CoV-2, but has a mortality rate of ten percent, then it would immediately affect the entire paralyze public life. What would happen would be so conspicuous and so terrible that there would be no discussion whatsoever about the need to stop it, even before it spread worldwide.” One can say with certainty that there will be new infectious diseases after the corona pandemic “and that some can also lead to pandemics,” said Drosten. “But a pandemic does not automatically mean tough measures like lockdowns. The last official major pandemic before Corona was in 2009 with the H1N1 virus, which some called swine flu at the time. Many didn’t even notice.” Drosten reiterated that the corona pandemic was “over” for him. “There may be another increase in the number of infections in winter, but that will probably not lead to a sharp increase in hospital cases,” he said. “No one can say what will happen in five years, but I would be very surprised if variants emerged again that lead to the severe courses we saw at the peak of the pandemic.” The director of the Charité Institute for International Health, Beate Kampmann, nevertheless urged caution. “The pandemic is definitely over, but that doesn’t mean that we no longer have to deal with the virus,” she told the Funke newspapers. “We have to pay attention to mutations and, if necessary, also adapt the vaccines and take the opportunity to reflect on the experiences – we shouldn’t drop everything.”
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