I Hope not. I think it’s possible. Is it likely? Tough one. Here’s what I think.

If you consider boring statistics it’s unlikely. Projection says that was it for the current century. But that’s oversimplified. It’s like predicting the weather on the basis of how the weather has been in the last hundred years. The circumstances have changed. We should consider the following.

Medical treatment has come a long way in the last 70 years. That’s fantastic but it comes with some unlucky side-effects, because diseases are oftentimes caused by organisms that have very short generation Intervalls. So our medical progress poses a selection pressure. We are unintentionally breeding super-germs that become increasingly resistant against treatment. Some day we will encounter a bacterial infection that is completely resistant against antibiotics.

On the other hand, as demonstrated in the last months, vaccine technology is becoming more sophisticated. In principle, we could be faster in immunisation than the diseases are evolving.

Secondly, we have encountered a pandemic now in an age of great scientific understanding and data collection and processing. We should expect that we have learned a whole lot about how to contain a novel infection before it spreads. However, people are stupid and might actually learn nothing. Moreover, we have been lucky with the Coronavirus because it’s a comparatively mild infection. Imagine a germ in Ebola-league. The collapse of infrastructure would be much much faster. And the disease might spread in a different way such that the measures we now have a lot of experience with are useless and we would need to start from scratch.

People have never been as mobile as today. If a novel infection emerges, it spreads globally fast. We might would’ve had a lot more pandemics in the past if people hadn’t been mostly confined to their regions. That kind of barrier is just gone.

So for one, the likelihood of a pandemic given that a new dangerous disease will spread much more easily if not contained immediately is higher than before.

The likelihood of such a dangerous disease emerging is higher because we provoke evolution and transmission of germs that didn’t pose a risk before.

The likelihood of containment of future pandemics should be higher since we are more experienced now.

My guess is, that it is not the last time in my lifetime that the threat of a pandemic occurs. If it will likely grownup a full-fledged pandemic is hard to predict since it depends on the specific situation. How dangerous and easily spreadable is the disease? What is the political landscape‘s attitude towards science and that kind of risk? Will we collectively change behaviours in order to prevent such developments? I don’t know. I just hope we got a bit smarter now. Otherwise, it will likely not have been the last pandemic for me.