Fine Read­ing: Lessons from the COVID Pan­demic

by Roberto

For many, the hor­rors lived through the pan­demic are now re­ced­ing mem­o­ries. From a more ob­jec­tive per­spec­tive, we can be­gin to pon­der some key ques­tions. What did each one of us learn from the ex­pe­ri­ence? What should we have known from the start of the pan­demic? A re­cently pub­lished in­ter­view that is both highly in­for­ma­tive and spelled out in clear lan­guage de­scribes nu­mer­ous bits of knowl­edge re­gard­ing the rel­e­vant vi­rol­ogy, im­munol­ogy, and epi­demi­ol­ogy al­ready in place in early 2020 that could have led to bet­ter pub­lic health pol­icy.

Fig. 1. Col­orized trans­mis­sion elec­tron mi­cro­scope im­age of SARS-CoV‑2. Source

David Wal­lace-Wells from The New York Times, in­ter­views Michael Mina, well-known for his early ad­vo­cacy of us­ing rapid anti­gen tests to bet­ter in­form pub­lic pol­icy dur­ing the pan­demic. I re­al­ize that The New York Times re­quires a sub­scrip­tion, but they do al­low non-sub­scribers to ac­cess a lim­ited num­ber of ar­ti­cles per month free of charge, here is the link to ar­ti­cle again. I strongly rec­om­mend read­ing this in­ter­view, there's much to learn from it. With­out be­ing overly crit­i­cal of how sci­en­tists in­formed the pub­lic or guided pub­lic pol­icy, Michael clearly de­scribes ar­eas where we could have done much bet­ter. To me, a key take-home mes­sage as to why we got some things so wrong was be­cause "epi­demi­ol­o­gists are not im­mu­nol­o­gists and im­mu­nol­o­gists are not vi­rol­o­gists and vi­rol­o­gists are not epi­demi­ol­o­gists." The lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion among those ex­perts re­sulted in less-than-op­ti­mal re­ac­tions. I dare to add ecol­o­gists and evo­lu­tion­ists to that string of spe­cial­ists. We could have greatly ben­e­fit­ted from hav­ing had more very broadly trained sci­en­tists. Such train­ing is some­thing that I have ad­vo­cated for be­fore, for ex­am­ple see here and here). As we look to the fu­ture, let's hope we keep this in mind as we train the fu­ture gen­er­a­tion. Broad knowl­edge and broad think­ing will be­come ever more im­por­tant to face global chal­lenges in the fu­ture.

 

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