The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread

Serge Morand; Bruno Andreas Walther

Given the lack of any antiviral or vaccine treatment, the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has forced governments to drastically curtail people's mobility and introduce continent-wide social distancing and lockdowns in order to at least slow its spread by lowering transmission rates. Thus, the governments' responses to this acute global health emergency actually mirror many of the recommendations which were given by the various modelling studies cited above. It should also be noted that the restriction of people's mobility (and its most extreme form, quarantine) and social distancing were already used before the advent of the germ theory of disease and are even used to . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license author/funder. It is made available under a The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.20.049866 doi: bioRxiv preprint some extent by other species (Hart, 2011; Tognotti, 2013; Bashford, 2016) .