Saturday marks 3 years since the World Health Organization first called the outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020, and the United Nation's health organization says it's not yet ready to say the emergency has ended.
With the pandemic still killing 900 to 1,000 people a day worldwide, the stealthy virus behind COVID-19 hasn't lost its punch. It spreads easily from person to person, riding respiratory droplets in the air, killing some victims but leaving most to bounce back without much harm.
At any moment, the virus could change to become more transmissible, more able to sidestep the immune system or more deadly. Topol said we’re not ready for that. Trust has eroded in public health agencies, furthering an exodus of public health workers. Resistance to stay-at-home orders and vaccine mandates may be the pandemic's legacy.FIGHTING BACK
Matthew Binnicker, an expert in viral infections at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said the world is in “a very different situation today than we were three years ago — where there was, in essence, zero existing immunity to the original virus.” “We rely so heavily on public data and it’s just not there,” said Beth Blauer, data lead for the project.
Internationally, the WHO’s tracking of COVID-19 relies on individual countries reporting. Global health officials have been voicing concern that their numbers severely underestimate what’s actually happening and they do not have a true picture of the outbreak. The disease feels random to her. “You don’t know who will survive, who will have long COVID or a mild cold. And then other people, they’ll end up in the hospital dying.”
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