It’s been a year since covid-19 emerged. The world still isn’t ready for it.
By David Von Drehle,
About this time a year ago, the earliest known Chinese patients were exposed to a new mutation of the SARS coronavirus. By December, enough of them had been hospitalized in the city of Wuhan to attract the attention of local health authorities. By the following month, the new virus was so widespread that the entire city of 11 million on the banks of the great Yangtze River was locked down in quarantine.
In the space of a single year, the novel virus has spread through most of the world, producing more than 53 million identified cases of the multi-symptom disease known as covid-19. At least 1.3 million deaths, including at least 242,000 in the United States alone, have been attributed to the pandemic, which has battered the global economy, disrupted daily life and arguably brought an end to an American presidency.
[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]
Yet — though the pandemic is without doubt the most impactful event of 2020 and bids fair to be the dominant fact of the next year as well — one is struck by how little we really know about it. This month, the World Health Organization launched what is likely to be a years-long investigation into the genesis of the outbreak. As for the response, there may be no more unsettled set of questions in public life today. The contamination of public health with politics has made even the simplest measures to fight the disease highly controversial.
According to the WHO, what we thought we knew about the origins of the pandemic might not be true at all. There’s a presumption that the virus got started among bats in China, jumped to another species sold for meat or fur and entered the human population at a so-called wet market, where animals are sold for consumption, in Wuhan. The theory might be right — but there are gaps. No bat has been found yet carrying the virus. No animals tested from the Wuhan market were found to be infected. Sewage samples from the market, however, tested positive. But here’s a wild card: A study posted without peer review on a medical science website in June claims to have found the virus in sewage samples taken in Barcelona months before the eruption in Wuhan. If confirmed, this result would upend the world’s understanding of the covid-19 story.
That we can’t say for certain, a year into the pandemic, where the virus came from or how it spread should be eye-opening. It tells us that the next killer mutation of a highly contagious virus could be taking hold even now. We probably wouldn’t know until it was off and running.
I feel like the Grinch for even mentioning the next deadly virus when we’re so miserably in the throes of this one and hoping for deliverance in the form of an early vaccine. But the next mutation is a question of when, not if. Nature gives no guarantees about timing or intensity. It could be 10 years down the road; it could be happening now.
When the next one comes, will we be any more prepared? In some respects, I imagine we will. We who have lived in the time of covid-19 won’t soon forget the value of adequate stockpiles of personal protective gear. Businesses and schools that have learned to work remotely and to keep people safely distanced may relax once the pandemic is under control, but they won’t lose their institutional knowledge.
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In more important ways, though, I fear we’ve gained little from our deadly lessons in the school of covid-19. Instead, Americans of various stripes have learned to distrust (take your pick) the WHO, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, Anthony S. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — and so on all the way down to our state and local public health authorities, and even our hospitals, doctors and coroners. Common sources of information about disease — starting with the mass media — are no longer reliable in the eyes of much of the public.
Even the idea of shared sacrifice, the bedrock of public health, has taken a beating. Measures such as mask-wearing, hand-washing and social distancing are only effective against a pandemic if they are widely and consistently practiced. Yet for many Americans (and others around the world), the supposed right of individuals to opt out of these relatively easy measures outweighs even the risk of death to fellow citizens. Libertarianism has reached its logical limit when people are proclaiming the freedom to be a vector of disease.
The sad fact is we haven’t dealt well with this year’s virus. Despite spending trillions of dollars, and the loss or interruption of countless lives, the novel coronavirus is spreading faster than ever. We’ll see what the WHO learns, but my takeaway is this: Luck protected us for many years, and now we need luck more than ever.
Read more from David Von Drehle’s archive.
Read more: The Post’s View: The pandemic is galloping ahead. The president is AWOL. Paul Waldman: Trump and Republicans are making the coming covid-19 nightmare worse The Post’s View: The U.S. must brake the runaway pandemic train Tom Bossert, Richard Danzig and James Lawler: A fall coronavirus disaster is already here. We can’t wait until Inauguration Day to act. Leana S. Wen: President-elect Biden needs get to work on the covid-19 pandemic. Today.
