The world is still reeling from the long-lasting effects of COVID-19, the pandemic having without a doubt casted great ripples through everyone who had to live through it, so with this ‘Disease X’ popping up in more and more headlines it’s more than understandable that people might be worried. People haven’t even had time to heal yet, and suddenly they have to deal with another big-shot virus health officials are getting iffy about? Well- there’s a lot of things the news won’t tell you, and one of those things is that Disease X doesn’t exist.
Kind of. It kind of doesn’t exist. It both does exist, and doesn’t. It’s Schrödinger’s disease, if you will. It’s slightly complicated.
The World Health Organization–or WHO–recently has been prioritizing diseases for research and development in case of another emergency crisis like the pandemic of 2020. This list includes things like COVID-19, Ebola, and even the Zika virus. And, at the very end of this list, on WHO’s official website, is the term “Disease X*”. Written exactly like that.
So what is this Disease X? And why are things like “World health leaders warn of pandemic 20 times worse than COVID (The Hill),” and “The Pandemic Treaty can help the world prepare for Disease X: Who Director-General (Down to Earth),” in the headlines when you search up this disease?
Without the jargon, Disease X is a hypothetical disease not currently on the list of dangerous diseases that could–theoretically–exist and wreak havoc across the globe should it start to spread. Simple, right? Not exactly.
More than that, WHO officials urge us to prepare for this hypothetical disease. As COVID itself would have technically qualified to be a type of Disease X, and it caused massive damage by itself. Were the conditions slightly different it could have been exponentially more destructive. Not a good thing, most people can agree, but beyond taking precautions to where people aren’t caught with their metaphorical pants down, what else should we do?
“Better safe than sorry,” said one Juan Renteria, a student here at Great Bend High School.
“I mean if it doesn’t really exist right now, don’t worry about it for now,” said Oscar Salcido, expressing disinterest in the hypothetical disease. “[I’d] wear gloves, or like a mask or something to make sure I didn’t get it.”His viewpoint is a common one throughout America, though not exactly the wrong one. Disease X could exist, that’s the entire point of it. Just as it could be twenty times worse than SARS, it could be twenty times better than it too. We don’t know. And that ignorance is going to stonewall any precautions from taking significant hold.
