As this thread slowly fades away, a nice summary of things
as they currently stand:
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.”
The tone:
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.
Where we're headed:
A Chinese scientist did offer one of the most provocative presentations. Immunologist Yunlong Cao of Peking University, another organizer of the meeting, noted the “extraordinary viral evolutionary speed” of SARS-CoV-2 not only means fresh variants are “continuously causing reinfections,” but that antibody treatments and vaccines can quickly lose effectiveness. None of the first approved monoclonal antibodies and vaccines work against current circulating strains.
Cao noted that only two of 140 antibodies his lab identified in early 2020 as able to neutralize the first variant of SARS-CoV-2 could protect against the virus in circulation 2 years later. “The only solution to this problem,” he said, “is if we can do accurate predictions about viral evolution” to assess which antibodies will retain their powers.
...
As for the future, Van Kerkhove warns that the world is dropping its guard against novel pathogens. Infectious disease is “not a safe space to really be working in,” she told Science. “Labs have been threatened. People have been threatened. Governments don’t necessarily want to be the ones to say, ‘Hey, we found something new.’”
There's quite a bit more, especially on the research and the hope for nasal vaccination. But I don't feel very hopeful reading the article. The final numbers for deaths in the United States probably won't come out for another week or so; as of 11/30/24 we had ~44K deaths attributable to Covid-19. In 2023 we were around 77K deaths and I'd not expecting the 2024 number to be higher than that.
I'm sad to say that's at a level we've collectively found acceptable. The pressure to do anything (I fear) has largely been removed.
