<
https://www.science.org/content/article/covid-5-years-later-learning-pandemic-many-are-forgetting>
"AWAJI, JAPAN—The COVID-19 pandemic, as best as we can tell, took more than 20
million lives, cost $16 trillion, kept 1.6 billion children out of school, and
pushed some 130 million people into poverty. And it’s not over: Figures from
October 2024 showed at least 1000 people died from COVID-19 each week, 75% of
them in the United States, and that’s relying only on data from the 34
countries that still report deaths to the World Health Organization (WHO). Last
month, at a 4-day meeting here on preventing future pandemics, WHO
epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove ticked off those figures with exasperation.
“The world I live in right now, no one wants to talk about COVID-19,” she told
the gathering. “Everyone is acting as though this pandemic didn’t really
happen.”
Yet 5 years after a coronavirus dubbed SARS-CoV-2 first surfaced in Wuhan,
China, scientists are still intensively trying to make sense of COVID-19. “We
would each have to read over 240 papers every single day to actually keep up
with all of the [COVID-19] literature that’s come out” in 2024, Cherilyn
Sirois, an editor at
Cell, noted.
Despite the flood of insights into the behavior of the virus and how to prevent
it from causing harm, many at the meeting worried the world has turned a blind
eye to the lessons learned from the pandemic. “I feel this massive
gravitational pull to go back to what we were doing before,” Van Kerkhove said.
“There’s no way we should be going back.”
Even more concerning to some at the conference, many countries have actually
become hostile toward pandemic prevention research, much of the anger stemming
from an unproven assertion that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab. “There’s been
massive public and political backlash against the virology community and public
health in general, so we may be worse off now locally than we were prior to the
pandemic,” said virologist Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, who was recently accused by Robert Redfield, former head of the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of being the “scientific
mastermind” of a supposed effort to engineer the virus."
Via Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
