Some additional reasons in favor of this hypothesis:
greater degree of interconnectedness and travel
compared to the past, a new zoonotic disease in Vietnam is much more likely to Brazil, and vice versa.
(disputed) factory farming increases both the absolute number of sick animals, and human-animal transmision, and factory farming appears to go up with time
(high uncertainty) empirical rate of epidemics seems to be going up with time
(possibly) climate change
lab accidents/escape and other artificial causes of novel pandemics
Some reasons against:
adaptive immunity, especially in youth. If young people are exposed to H5N1, SARS-CoV-2, etc, they a) are in many situations less directly affected by eg covid and b) can build long-lasting immune responses such that future exposure to them as adults will be less effective than on immunologically naive adults.
evolution of pathogens to be less lethal with time
While this is by no means guaranteed, under some models there are tradeoffs between how lethal a pathogen is, and how likely they are to infect people. To the extent this is true, we might expect formerly lethal pathogens to become less lethal with time
This is hypothesized to have occurred with the Spanish flu and earlier (pre-COVID, pre-SARS) coronaviruses
social/policy responses to the threat of pandemics
in the absence of advanced medical interventions, we might still have social/policy non-medical interventions to try to reduce the load of pandemics.
for example, flying might become less common (more penalized), quarantines might become more common
On balance, I personally think it’s more likely that we’ll have increased rather than decreased probability of pandemics in the coming decades, especially in the absence of next-gen countermeasures. But I’m pretty uncertain overall, and I can imagine it flipping either way.
I think the second reason “against” is probably the only true argument that my hypothesis is wrong.
The first reason still doesn’t prevent the disease burden after covid/any new pathogen spilled into humans from being appreciably bigger than the disease burden before the event.
The third reason is of course about interventions, which can go...many ways.
I didn’t raise it in my original question but I wondered if this hypothesis applied to non-human species, which would still be a pretty interesting problem since it might impose a limit to the propagation of any species (as it collects more different kinds of pathogens overtime and need to contend with them).
Some additional reasons in favor of this hypothesis:
greater degree of interconnectedness and travel
compared to the past, a new zoonotic disease in Vietnam is much more likely to Brazil, and vice versa.
(disputed) factory farming increases both the absolute number of sick animals, and human-animal transmision, and factory farming appears to go up with time
(high uncertainty) empirical rate of epidemics seems to be going up with time
(possibly) climate change
lab accidents/escape and other artificial causes of novel pandemics
Some reasons against:
adaptive immunity, especially in youth. If young people are exposed to H5N1, SARS-CoV-2, etc, they a) are in many situations less directly affected by eg covid and b) can build long-lasting immune responses such that future exposure to them as adults will be less effective than on immunologically naive adults.
evolution of pathogens to be less lethal with time
While this is by no means guaranteed, under some models there are tradeoffs between how lethal a pathogen is, and how likely they are to infect people. To the extent this is true, we might expect formerly lethal pathogens to become less lethal with time
This is hypothesized to have occurred with the Spanish flu and earlier (pre-COVID, pre-SARS) coronaviruses
social/policy responses to the threat of pandemics
in the absence of advanced medical interventions, we might still have social/policy non-medical interventions to try to reduce the load of pandemics.
for example, flying might become less common (more penalized), quarantines might become more common
On balance, I personally think it’s more likely that we’ll have increased rather than decreased probability of pandemics in the coming decades, especially in the absence of next-gen countermeasures. But I’m pretty uncertain overall, and I can imagine it flipping either way.
I think the second reason “against” is probably the only true argument that my hypothesis is wrong.
The first reason still doesn’t prevent the disease burden after covid/any new pathogen spilled into humans from being appreciably bigger than the disease burden before the event.
The third reason is of course about interventions, which can go...many ways.
I didn’t raise it in my original question but I wondered if this hypothesis applied to non-human species, which would still be a pretty interesting problem since it might impose a limit to the propagation of any species (as it collects more different kinds of pathogens overtime and need to contend with them).