Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
As World Mostly Moves On From Covid, NJ Family Copes With Profound Loss
The New York Times: For A Family That Lost 5 Loved Ones, ‘Covid Will Never Be Over’
Elizabeth Fusco’s relatives had their usual family dinner in New Jersey in early 2020. Soon, her mother, three siblings and aunt were all dead. (Tully, 3/10)
Looking back at the past five years —
Scientific American: On COVID’s Fifth Anniversary, Scientists Reflect On Mistakes And Successes
Five years ago Tuesday, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic involving a dangerous new virus—and across the planet, life as we knew it ground to a shuddering halt. Today, COVID continues to kill more people than influenza—although the flu has hospitalized more people in the U.S. this winter. And SARS-CoV-2 still triggers localized waves of infection several times a year, wastewater testing reveals. More than seven million people worldwide have died of COVID, though this is likely a gross underestimate. And the virus continues to kill thousands of people every month. (Lewis, 3/5)
The New York Times: 30 Charts That Show How Covid Changed Everything In March 2020
Here’s an incomplete collection of charts that capture that break — across the economy, health care, education, work, family life and more. (Bhatia and Cabreros, 3/9)
Axios: COVID's Legacy: Public Health's Diminished Power
COVID-19 put public health officials on the front lines against a once-in-a-lifetime threat. It's left them with less power and resources to respond to future emergencies. Instead of strengthening America's public health infrastructure, the pandemic experience spawned hundreds of new laws in at least 24 states limiting public health orders or otherwise undercutting emergency responses. (Reed, 3/10)
Stat: Drug Overdoses Have Caused More U.S. Deaths Than Covid
The 2020s have inarguably been Covid-19’s decade. Since the coronavirus outbreak was acknowledged as a pandemic exactly five years ago, the pandemic has killed well over 1 million Americans, derailed the global economy, and sparked political upheaval that continues today. It also yielded what many hail as the greatest scientific accomplishment in human history: the development of effective vaccines in under a year. Yet in dominating the early 2020s, Covid-19 also distracted from what is arguably a more significant public health emergency. Even at the height of the pandemic, more young Americans died of drug overdose than Covid. (Facher, 3/11)
BBC: Five Years On: The Countries That Never Locked Down For Covid-19
Sweden, Taiwan, Uruguay, Iceland and a few others never enacted a lockdown that involved severe restrictions on the movement of people, such as legally binding stay-at-home orders applied across large swathes of the population. Those countries instead chose other measures, such as restrictions on large gatherings of people, extensive testing and quarantining infected people or travel restrictions. Five years later, the scientific studies and data have piled up, offering a detailed, long-term assessment of whether these countries were right to reject this most drastic of public health interventions. (Baraniuk, 3/5)
What we now know about covid —
The New York Times: A Clearer Picture Of Covid’s Lasting Effects On The Body
Five years on, scientists are starting to understand how the virus can lead to long-term, sometimes invisible changes. (Blum, Agrawal and Callahan, 3/10)
MedPage Today: What Did We Learn From The Earliest COVID Trials?
It's easy to forget how helpless clinicians around the world felt 5 years ago, when the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. They were either bracing for or treating a flood of new patients coming to the hospital — and they had not a single clinical trial to guide treatment decisions. There was, of course, no shortage of opinions on what to do, said Roy Gulick, MD, MPH, an infectious diseases physician at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, who was on the frontlines of the outbreak at the time. (Fiore, 3/10)
Looking ahead —
The New York Times: History Isn’t Entirely Repeating Itself In Covid’s Aftermath
Five years after Covid-19 shut down activities all over the world, medical historians sometimes struggle to place the pandemic in context. What, they are asking, should this ongoing viral threat be compared with? Is Covid like the 1918 flu, terrifying when it was raging but soon relegated to the status of a long-ago nightmare? (Kolata, 3/11)
ScienceNews: 5 Years After COVID-19 Became A Pandemic, Are We Ready For What’s Next?
Five years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Whether it still is depends on who you ask. There are no clear criteria to mark the end of a pandemic, and the virus that causes the disease — SARS-CoV-2 — continues evolving and infecting people worldwide. “Whether the pandemic ended or not is an intellectual debate,” says clinical epidemiologist and long COVID researcher Ziyad Al-Aly of Washington University in St. Louis. “For the family that lost a loved one a week ago in the ICU, that threat is real. That pain is real. That loss is real.” (Prillaman, 3/10)
Chicago Tribune: COVID 5-Year Anniversary: Health Officials Warn Against Trump's Cuts
The patient wasn’t initially worried when she first caught COVID-19. Fully vaccinated and relatively healthy at the age of 41, Johanna Claudette of the Irving Park neighborhood thought the positive test in February 2022 wouldn’t be a big deal. But within days, her memory became spotty. Her heart raced and she became fatigued. Today, she said, she’s still grappling with blurry vision, chest pain and brain fog — all symptoms of the chronic condition called long COVID, which can linger for months or even years after an initial infection and which has afflicted millions worldwide. (Lourgos, 3/9)
CNN: Federal Government No Longer Accepting Orders For Free Covid-19 Tests
The federal government program that provides free at-home Covid-19 tests says it is “not currently accepting orders,” according to the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response website. It’s not clear whether the program has shut down permanently. (Christensen, 3/10)
