5 Years After Covid-19 Became a Pandemic, Are We Ready for What's Next?

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Five years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Whether it still is depends on who you ask. There are no clear criteria to mark the end of a pandemic, and the virus that causes the disease - SARS-CoV-2 - continues evolving and infecting people worldwide.

Whether the pandemic ended or not is an intellectual debate," says clinical epidemiologist and long COVID researcher Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University in St. Louis. For the family that lost a loved one a week ago in the ICU, that threat is real. That pain is real. That loss is real."

According to recent WHO data, 521 people in the United States died of COVID-19 in the last week of 2024. That's drastically lower than at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Nearly 17,000 people died of COVID-19 the last week of that year.

Dropping death and hospitalization rates, largely due to vaccinations and high levels of immunity, led to WHO and the United States ending their COVID-19 public health emergencies in 2023. The U.S. government has since reduced reporting of infections and access to free vaccines, tests and treatments. In the last two years, health professionals, scientists and policymakers have shifted to managing COVID-19 as an endemic disease, one that's always present and may surge at certain times of the year.

Over the last five years, researchers have learned heaps about the virus and how to thwart it. But the pandemic also provided insights into health inequities, flaws in health care systems and the power of collaboration. But it's hard to predict how the United States and other countries will manage COVID-19 going forward, let alone future pandemics.

[...] Long COVID can affect nearly every organ system. People think about it [as causing] brain frog and fatigue. Those can be symptoms of long COVID, but it's much more than that. We have people with heart problems, kidney problems and metabolic problems. In some individuals, long COVID can be mild and not disabling. But in others, it can be severely disabling, to the point of people being in bed and losing their jobs.

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