Archives for December 2022

People who worked on pandemic preparedness anticipated the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of spring 2020. But many other things about the #Covid-19 pandemic have come as a surprise. I've chronicled some of them. https://t.co/yLtEtNM5cA

— Helen Branswell ???? (@HelenBranswell) December 27, 2022

Here’s a separate post, for the people who didn’t have time to read the link in my latest Covid Update Friday morning. Helen Branswell has been one of my go-to sources for pandemic information over the last three years:

People who study infectious diseases and who work in public health have long known a bad pandemic would one day come.

They knew such an event would overwhelm hospitals, strain supply chains, and place stresses on society that we would be ill-equipped to meet. Countries like the United States have for decades prepared to respond to such a crisis.

But despite all the planning, the Covid-19 pandemic has, in myriad ways, not played out as expected. Three years after the first reports of a novel virus emerged from China, these experts admit that the microbe and the world’s response to it have continuously deviated from their forecasts.

In the hope that important lessons for next time can be found in the things we didn’t anticipate this time, STAT asked 23 experts what had surprised them the most about the pandemic.

The TL;DR version: We have a lot of learning left to do.

Containment can buy time
… After China successfully slowed the spread of the new virus with draconian measures limiting individuals’ movements, many countries instituted some versions of what came to be known as “lockdown.” In some cases the actions were too late or too inefficiently implemented to make a big difference. But a number of countries deployed these measures with significant success; New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, among others, lost far fewer lives than peer nations. And of course China, where the pandemic began, kept Covid largely at bay until very recently, albeit with restrictions that would not be accepted in other parts of the world.

The WHO pandemic flu response plan is being updated to incorporate what was learned about containment efforts during Covid. Cowling said it won’t advise long-term efforts to try to stop a new pandemic virus, but “temporary containment to buy time, actually, I think some places will consider.”…

How variable the illness was
Covid has killed millions around the world, including more than 1 million in the United States. But some people who have been infected have no symptoms at all. Others have the equivalent of a head cold.

Some patterns are intuitive. Many of the deaths have been in people in their 70s, 80s, and beyond. Many have been in people with chronic health conditions that undermine their ability to fight off the infection.

But sometimes the variability of the illness makes little sense, a fact that has surprised Deepta Bhattacharya, professor of immunology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine…

How quickly people could be reinfected
While an ever-dwindling number of people have not yet experienced a Covid infection, some have been infected several times. For some, the interval between Covid bouts is amazingly short.

“Anecdotally, I know several instances where infections occurred, the infection resolved clinically, and then the person became symptomatic again with SARS-CoV-2 positivity a few weeks after the initial infection,” said Stanley Perlman, a longtime coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa…

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Excellent Read: <em>The Pandemic — What Even the Experts Didn’t See Coming</em>Post + Comments (115)