That tells you theres something wrong with how [we] evaluated our preparedness, says Dr. Adalja.
Still, experts are grappling with the takeaways from this deadly experience.
Health-care workers need better support to avoid burnout.
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Front-line health-care workers have of course been traumatized.
People have considered leaving medicine.
Theyve experienced so much first-hand suffering and separation from family.
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It resembles, from what I can tell, people returning from the battlefield.
Anecdotally, Dr. Evans says, burnout, stress, and depression have affected her colleagues overall health.
People who do hospital and academic epidemiology work and research are overwhelmed, she says.
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They would say, So you work on skin.
Now everyone knows what an epidemiologist does, says Dr. Evans.
I think the military works in rest and relaxation for good reason, says Dr. Kim.
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In retrospect, well hopefully be better prepared to provide respite if this were to happen in the future.
Inclusive community organizations are critical to address health disparities across races.
Starting last October, the gap began to narrow.
Organizers helped people invulnerable communitiesconnect to health-care providers and sign up for insurance and other support programs.
Its important you do workwithpeople and not on their behalf without their inclusion.
In a crisis, strong existing relationships and community knowledge are incredibly valuable.
We should assume people who dont seem sick can still spread respiratory viruses.
Thats why masks werent emphasized early on during this pandemic, she adds.
Theyre not as important as isolating when ill for a disease that only transmits when one is sick.
Since then, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that seemingly healthy people can transmit COVID-19 to others.
Somestudieshave suggested that roughly one in five people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic but still potentially contagious.
In a future pandemic, experts will likely ask the public to mask and socially distance from the get-go.
In hindsight, we should have assumed asymptomatic or presymptomatic transmission just in case, says Dr. Smith.
I suspect we will with any other novel respiratory virus that emerges in the future.
Prevention is critical to keeping variants under controland vaccines effective.
Shed conducted a2020 studythat predicted these variants before they arose.
We had data like this all the way back in the summer of last year, says Dr. Hatziioannou.
What we obtained was a tunnel of mutants that mirror all of the variants we see now.
When a virus infects you, it attaches to your cells to copy itself and survive.
Thats why we have to stop the virus from replicating now through vaccination, masking, and social distancing.
These variants arose because of our failure to stop the spread, Dr. Hatziioannou says.
We should be more proactive in imposing actions earlier and keeping them up.
Government officials need to trust and believe in scienceand communicate that science clearly to the public.
The human tendency to venture to make sense of chaos in a crisis gave COVID-19conspiracy theoriesan enduring stronghold.
At first, there were certainly reasons to be hopeful about HCQ.
We know what works in the lab doesnt always work in people, Dr. Kim says.
Theres a firehose of information, with hundreds of papers coming out every day.
We were just trying to make sense of it all, he says.
But experts are much more confident in their ability to manage COVID-19.
Our arsenal is limited, but at least we know [these treatments] are helpful, he says.
Pandemics wont end without global cooperation.
We arent going to be able to treat our way out of disease.
Mass vaccination is the proposed solution.
Its not a question of beingableto make enough vaccine, says Dr. Gupta.
Theres an issue globally.
If raw materials are the issue, its a global issue, not specific to India.
Supplying these areas with vaccines will require major international coordination.
Whats efficacious and can be rapidly scaled up?
Beyond saving lives, we all have selfish reasons to keep the virus in check through global vaccination.
Wherever COVID is occurring matters to the world.
The virus knows no boundaries.
That all took a fair amount of collaboration among many different partners.
Those are examples we should use to prepare for the next pandemic, she says.
Funding for public health is essential, even when were not in a pandemic.
Hospital administrations…dont really think about excess capacity, says Dr. Adalja.
Theyve implemented just-in-time inventory management.
A lack of resourcing for public health departments compounded the issue.
This was the in case of, says Dr. Evans, with Northwestern Medicine.
I think that will be one of the biggest lessons we learned from the COVID pandemic.
We have to invest for the long haul so we can test, detect, and act early.
Does this bring to mind the 2008 financial panic?
Fortunately, efforts are underway.
Theres going to be a COVID commission, similar to the 9/11 commission.
I do think there is a major concerted effort to never let this happen again.
We just have to keep the momentum going until we actually get legislation in place.
