Five Years After Pandemic, What Have We Learned?
I first noticed a niggle that a health threat was on the horizon in late February 2020 while on a trip to Fort Worth. My Beautiful Mystery Companion and I popped in at a Texas Press Association conference so I could briefly meet with some folks, say hello to longtime colleagues, and enjoy a couple of days in Cowtown. News of a mysterious new virus out of China was beginning to spread. A few folks at the conference mentioned it, wondering how widespread it might become.
By early March, talk of what came to be called COVID-19 was beginning to dominate the news. A high school friend and I met at the CrossFit gym, as we did several times weekly. He is a respected doctor who was closely following the spread of the virus, which had recorded the earliest confirmed death from COVID-19 on Feb. 6, in California.
“I think we better not come to the gym for a while,” he suggested, or words to that effect. I readily agreed, though the gym’s owner was making every effort to keep all the equipment sanitized. Five years later, we know far more about how the virus spread — probably more airborne than on surfaces. Still, sweating, panting, coughing, and otherwise expelling airborne particles in an enclosed space — like a gym — didn’t feel advisable.
In their defense, scientists were doing the best they could at the time with the information at hand. Preventive efforts changed. Masks or no masks. Social distancing or not. Kids physically in classrooms or not. Wiping down surfaces or not. That is how science works. Trial and error.
By the time spring break drew near, it became clear students would not be returning to the university campus where I still work part-time as a reference librarian/archivist. While President Orange Skull did not implement a nationwide shutdown in response to the burgeoning number of cases and rising fatalities, he declared a national emergency on March 13, 2020. States and local governments were left on their own to decide how to respond. Bleach injections were suggested. It would be over by Easter, POS said. Here in East Texas, the world largely shut down, with the huge exception of so-called essential workers: healthcare workers, first responders, those who worked in grocery stores, etc. We still owe them a huge debt.
Five years. Some days, it seems like ancient times. My BMC and I worked from home for 14 months. She taught her university courses via Teams (it’s like Zoom, a better-known competitor), while I fulfilled interlibrary loan requests for journal articles and occasionally went to the library to help install end caps or perform other handyman chores, working alone in a shuttered, darkened building. It felt like being a character in Night at the Museum.
Still, we were fortunate, even blessed. We owned a nice house in town at the time (we now live on a 57-acre farm north of Longview) and could safely walk the neighborhood with the pups while engaging in “social distancing.” That meant waving at neighbors walking from across the street, who were walking their own pups. We adapted to grocery-store pickup, ordered a ridiculous amount of stuff online, installed our own CrossFit gym at home, wore masks on rare trips inside stores, read dozens of books, and watched hours of television.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1,223,304 people in America died from COVID-19 since that first fatality in February 2020. Roughly, that’s losing nearly all of Dallas to death. Here in Gregg County, according to USAFacts — a nonpartisan, nonprofit website founded by Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft — a total of 22,636 cases were reported, resulting in 730 deaths. In Texas, 92,378 deaths were attributed to COVID-19. That is comparable to wiping out Longview and tossing in most of Kilgore for good measure.
Our families were fortunate. Nobody became seriously ill with COVID-19. I personally knew a half-dozen people who died from COVID-19. Bless them and prayers for their families. We received the vaccine as soon as we could, in February 2021, and have gotten every available booster since. Unlike Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the delusional and wacky head of the Department of Health and Human Services, we strongly believe vaccines save lives and reduce the severity of illness. In the case of COVID-19, the vaccine and booster greatly reduce the effects if one contracts the virus.
I know this personally. Since being vaccinated and boosted, I have twice caught a variant of the virus. The results were mild symptoms, annoyance at being sequestered for a few days, and a quick recovery.
One of many tragedies about this pandemic and the corresponding reaction, is that nearly 320,000 deaths in the United States could have been prevented if everyone had gotten the vaccine when it became available. Now a vaccine-denier heads HHS. The United States is again going through the process of withdrawing from the World Health Organization unsuccessfully attempted during POS’s first term. Funding for scientific research is being slashed wholesale. Trump’s choice for director of the National Institutes for Health once argued for allowing the virus to spread to create herd immunity. I expect to see bloodletting and leeches come back into fashion in the near future.
None of this bodes well for the next pandemic. And there will be another one. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) indicates a one in 50 chance each year of a pandemic similar to COVID-19. There is a better chance of another pandemic than winning big on a Lotto scratch-off ticket.
I don’t like those odds.
David Frum, one of my favorite conservative writers and a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, recently wrote a powerful piece in The Atlantic titled Why The Covid Deniers Won: Lessons from the pandemic and its aftermath.
Here’s an excerpt:
Americans first diverged over how dangerous the disease was: just a flu (as President Donald Trump repeatedly insisted) or something much deadlier.
Then they disputed public-health measures such as lockdowns and masking; a majority complied while a passionate minority fiercely resisted.
Finally, they split—and have remained split—over the value and safety of COVID‑19 vaccines… Five years later, one side has seemingly triumphed. The winner is not the side that initially prevailed, the side of public safety. The winner is the side that minimized the disease, then rejected public-health measures to prevent its spread, and finally refused the vaccines designed to protect against its worst effects.
Meanwhile, the H5N1 bird flu virus has public health experts raising alarms that it could mutate into a pandemic. In West Texas, the worst measles outbreak since 1992 continues to spread. As a recent Texas Tribune article noted, the state now spends less per person on public health than it did before COVID-19 arrived, fewer Texans or their children are getting vaccinated, and new laws reduce the power of elected officials to act during a health crisis.
As a Yale professor who co-authored an article in the New England Journal of Medicine wrote last year, “The social epidemic of forgetting is probably the most worrisome public health event of 2024.”
And that was before the present occupant of the Oval Office began appointing quacks to powerful positions running public health organizations, while letting Elon Musk’s DOGE Boys slash programs designed to keep us safe in the event of another widespread health crisis.
We are building a pandemic Pandora’s box with these actions. It is increasingly likely something will pry the lid open in the future. It might be a variant of avian flu becoming widely transmissible between humans. It might be another pathogen currently undetected. Whatever occurs, we are increasingly ill-equipped to deal with it, despite having gone through a worldwide pandemic just five years ago.
That is a tragedy and a travesty, an unforced error that will kill people if it comes to pass.
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