10-08-2023, 05:02 AM
We Should Have Known So Much About Covid From the Start
Oct. 5, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/opini...GnI-ZnsR4Z&smid=url-share
America has begun to treat Covid-19 like just any other disease — boosters are now arriving on an annual fall cycle, on the flu model, with large portions of the country not bothering with them, also on the flu model.
But, objectively, Covid is not just another disease — not yet. Last year, it was the only infectious disease among the country’s top 10 causes of death. We are obviously on an off-ramp from the pandemic emergency, since even though many more Americans have gotten Covid over the last year, many fewer are dying than did in the first two years of Covid-19. But while the worst is behind us, it’s also not quite right to see the disease as epidemiological wallpaper.
This is precisely the long transition from emergency to normality that the immunologist and epidemiologist Michael Mina has predicted since almost the beginning of the pandemic. Beginning in 2020, Mina took pains to describe Covid-19 as a “textbook virus,” with features that may have startled lay people — long Covid and post-acute sequelae, waning immunity and reinfection — but were, in his view, simply what could be expected from a new pathogen spreading through a global population with no immunity.
I spoke to Mina about what seeing Covid as a textbook virus tells us about the nature of the pandemic off-ramp — and about everything else we should’ve known about the disease from the outset. I’ve edited and condensed our conversation for clarity, and added some material from a follow-up interview.
Oct. 5, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/opini...GnI-ZnsR4Z&smid=url-share
America has begun to treat Covid-19 like just any other disease — boosters are now arriving on an annual fall cycle, on the flu model, with large portions of the country not bothering with them, also on the flu model.
But, objectively, Covid is not just another disease — not yet. Last year, it was the only infectious disease among the country’s top 10 causes of death. We are obviously on an off-ramp from the pandemic emergency, since even though many more Americans have gotten Covid over the last year, many fewer are dying than did in the first two years of Covid-19. But while the worst is behind us, it’s also not quite right to see the disease as epidemiological wallpaper.
This is precisely the long transition from emergency to normality that the immunologist and epidemiologist Michael Mina has predicted since almost the beginning of the pandemic. Beginning in 2020, Mina took pains to describe Covid-19 as a “textbook virus,” with features that may have startled lay people — long Covid and post-acute sequelae, waning immunity and reinfection — but were, in his view, simply what could be expected from a new pathogen spreading through a global population with no immunity.
I spoke to Mina about what seeing Covid as a textbook virus tells us about the nature of the pandemic off-ramp — and about everything else we should’ve known about the disease from the outset. I’ve edited and condensed our conversation for clarity, and added some material from a follow-up interview.