The News
Tuesday marks the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID-19 a pandemic: Since then, scientists have linked the disease to an estimated 20 million deaths worldwide and $16 trillion in costs.
The pandemic also spurred rapid, unprecedented scientific achievement: As one scientist said in December, 2020, “in the last 11 months, probably 10 years’ work has been done.”
Researchers developed and tested mRNA vaccines for the first time, ushering in the possibility of immunizations for conditions, from cancer to heart disease. The consensus understanding of our immune system evolved rapidly, while behavioral and mental health research also flourished.
Many unanswered questions remain: Public health experts expect that a future pandemic is not only possible but probable, and as the US — the world’s largest national donor — pulls back much of its global health funding, scientists are increasingly worried that another outbreak would not see the same collective response.
SIGNALS
The scientific response to the pandemic resulted in breakthroughs
COVID-19 spread globally at devastating speeds, matched “only by the pace of scientific insights,” Nature wrote in 2020. Weeks after the first reports of the disease emerged from Wuhan, geneticists had mapped and published the virus’ genome, enabling the first mass rollout of mRNA vaccines, which harnessed that genetic blueprint to prime the immune system to fight a disease. The urgency of the pandemic spurred an “all hands on deck” approach, one scientist said at the time, with global collaboration and information sharing crucial to those early breakthroughs. However, as concern over COVID-19 has waned and geopolitical tensions between the US and China have risen, declining scientific collaboration between the two nations has led to concerns that future research breakthroughs could be held back.
Immunology flourished, but so did smaller fields of science
The unique conditions of a pandemic offered diverse avenues for discovery, The New York Times wrote. The flu receded in the first years of the pandemic as the measures people took to avoid getting COVID-19 also protected them from other respiratory diseases. Researchers also found that, even if both a husband and wife are at home all day, women still do a larger share of the housework. In sports, behavioral scientists found that fans were crucial to the so-called “home-field advantage,” whereby teams tend to win when they play at their own stadiums — without an audience, the advantage disappeared.
Scientists still have many questions to answer about Long Covid
It became clear early in the pandemic that COVID-19 could, in some cases, cause long-lasting, adverse changes to a person’s health and immune system function — a collection of symptoms that has since come to be known as “Long Covid.” Some 3.6% of American adults are estimated to have Long Covid: Often left in a kind of “medical limbo,” these individuals’ long-term care costs and needs remain unclear, MSNBC noted. Ed Yong, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his pandemic reporting for The Atlantic, warned recently that the relative neglect of Long Covid leaves societies less prepared for future pandemics: “Once the problem abates, so, too does everything else… and we lapse into the same level of unpreparedness that led to the panic.”