UCHealth: COVID-19, What we’ve learned since the beginning of the pandemic!

25 Dec UCHealth: COVID-19, What we’ve learned since the beginning of the pandemic!

We curated this excellent article by Todd Neff from UCHealth Today. The title: “COVID-19: What we’ve learned since the beginning of the pandemic. As the coronavirus pandemic enters its third year, we’ve learned a lot. There have been misses – and big hits.”

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Dr. Thomas Campbell

Two years may feel like an eternity to a world weary of the coronavirus pandemic. In terms of scientific development, it’s been the blink of an eye, and we’ve learned a lot during that blink.

A century separated Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” and the discovery of DNA’s double helix. Another half-century or so passed before gene editing took hold.

Humanity’s ability to fight SARS-CoV-2 has gained enormously from the lessons learned during those and more recent decades. Within about a month of novel coronavirus cases being conclusively identified in December 2019, Chinese scientists had sequenced the coronavirus genome. With that, the global race to find ways to stop the virus’s spread and prevent those infected from getting seriously ill commenced. As the virus mutates and burns through vulnerable populations and the Greek alphabet, that race continues.

Ever since, the vast majority of us who aren’t scientists have had a front-row seat in the hit-or-miss world of hypothesis development and the empirical research that follows it.

What we’ve learned during the pandemic

After emptying stores of bleach and disinfecting wipes, we learned that surface transmission wasn’t in fact much of a driver of this particular disease (though it is with many others) – rather, aerosol transmission through the air we breathe was causing most infections. With that insight, we further learned that masking slows COVID-19’s spread, which we learned can happen before symptoms present (presymptomatically) or in the total absence of symptoms (asymptomatically). We learned the hard way that COVID-19 infections are nastier among the aged, the overweight and obese (perhaps because we learned that the coronavirus attacks fat tissue), those with diabetes, the immunocompromised, and other population segments. We learned that pregnant women who catch the coronavirus have a higher risk of preterm births.

We learned that infusing convalescent plasma from those who have recovered from COVID-19 doesn’t help fight coronavirus infections, nor does zinc or hydroxychloroquine. Ivermectin probably doesn’t, either, though the clinical trials proving or disproving that statement remain to be published. Those findings will soon join the more than 20,000 papers dedicated to some facet of a zombie life form of which 10 billion – a number greater than that of the global human population it continues to menace – could fit in a single layer atop your fingernail.

Greatest hits during a global pandemic…

Continue reading here.