COVID 2 years later: 5 big questions about pandemics that can’t be answered yet

When it rings in 2022, it will enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2019, Wuhan residents of China first, Unknown pneumonia It quickly covered the earth.To date, there have been more than 290 million infections, resulting in nearly 5.5 million people died..

Since then, progress has been made rapidly against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Multiple effective vaccines Much faster than normal 4 to 10 years of development, it emerged in a year.Pfizer is FDA approved for that COVID antiviral drug PaxrovidPharmaceutical giants say they can reduce the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19 by up to 89%.

Infectious disease specialists Science Infected with COVID-19, it is now possible to quickly identify mutations. delta When Omicron variant.

But two years later, as the United States 824,000 people died From COVID, and from tens of millions of infectious diseases and hospitalizations, scientists are still struggling to answer some of our biggest questions about viruses. The details of COVID-19 are as follows. About the new Omicron variant And whether you can still be considered “fully vaccinated” No booster shot..

How many COVID booster shots do I need?

Vaccines appear to result in reduced defense against COVID-19 and continued evolution of the mutant, so Moderna President Stephen Hogue said in the case of influenza, at least to protect against the highest risk of infection. As well, he said he is likely to need a seasonal COVID booster. And a serious illness.

The CDC updated guidance This indicates that people with immunodeficiency may develop a fourth COVID-19 infection after 2022. Meanwhile, Israel, Germany and other countries are investigating the effectiveness of the fourth infection against the general public.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Chief Medical Advisor of the White House, said the fourth jab in the United States is “thinkable.”

“We think we may need additional shots in the future, but at this point we hope to improve the durability of our protection from booster shots,” Fauci said. increase. At the White House briefing December 29th. “Take one step at a time, get data from the third boost, and make decisions based on scientific data.”

How long does immunity from the vaccine last with mutants like Omicron?

The first COVID-19 vaccine has arrived America a year ago And from the two most effective in the United States — modern When Pfizer / BioNTech — Take a unique approach: Use messenger RNA (mRNA) to teach cells how to make proteins that provoke an immune response against the virus.

Researchers have been studying mRNA vaccines “for decades,” To CDC, This is the first time they have been made publicly available. Scientists continue to collect information about how effective they are and how long they take to begin to decline.

“We definitely understand that,” Gronval said. “Seeing the protection weaken before 6 months, that’s why boosters are recommended at 6 months.”

With the emergence of new varieties like the rapidly expanding Omicron, she added, “whether boosters are sufficient for a long period of time is something we still need to clarify.”

according to To the World Health OrganizationThe Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are far less effective in preventing infection with the Omicron strain than the previous COVID-19 mutants. Other vaccines, including Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and vaccines manufactured in Russia and China, are even less effective in preventing infection by the Omicron variant. New York Times report.

Still, fully vaccinated individuals are far less likely to experience severe symptoms, hospitalization, and death. Harvard Medical School, Especially they Receive booster shots..

“This isn’t the worst-case scenario where a vaccine doesn’t work,” Gronnvall said. “In the laboratory scenario, the vaccine is less protected. It seems to be backed up, but it can’t be projected into the real world yet.”

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Will there be more variants like delta and omicron?

Viruses constantly mutate. Sometimes these mutations result in new disease strains that emerge quickly and disappear, according to the CDC. Other times, they persist and create spikes in the rate of infection and disease. In two years, COVID has mutated into five “variants of concern,” according to WHO, based on the severity of disease, the effectiveness of medical countermeasures and the strain’s ability to spread from person to person.

The alpha, beta and gamma variants were all downgraded to “variants being monitored” in September, with delta and omicron still considered variants of concern. This week federal health officials declared the omicron variant the dominant strain in the US, accounting for nearly three-quarters of new infections. Preliminary studies indicate illness caused by omicron may be less severe than delta, which doubled the hospitalization rate of the original alpha strain, but is also far more contagious. 

Health officials warn that the longer the pandemic lasts and the longer large groups remain unvaccinated, the more time the virus will have to spread and mutate. While researchers can quickly map and identify variants, they need time to see how dangerous a new strain is as they gather data on hospitalizations and deaths.

“We’re still not great at looking at new variants and projecting what that means in the real world,” Gronvall said. “We have better tools to read genetic material and determine when variants emerge. But we can’t read them like a book.”

Why does COVID make some people sicker, including with long COVID?

We know the virus can cause symptoms ranging from headaches, chills and fever to disorientation, nausea and vomiting — and even loss of taste or smell. While scientists continue to piece together who is more likely to get hit with these outcomes, they still lack answers about why some experience serious illness and others don’t. 

Age is definitely the biggest correlation for severe disease, Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told CNET. “But there have been 29-year-olds who have died, children who have died, when all indications suggest they should have had a mild disease course.” Scientists are also trying to get their arms around “long COVID” — a range of symptoms that can run on for weeks or even months after a patient is first infected.

The World Health Organization has issued a definition that includes a variety of lingering symptoms — including fatigue, trouble breathing, sleeplessness, difficulty focusing, anxiety and depression — and the list keeps changing. Even so, the condition’s cause is not clearly known.

“After two years, we don’t understand much about long COVID, and don’t know its prevalence with omicron after vaccination,” Bob Wachter, the chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, tweeted Wednesday. “It remains a hardship for millions and a lingering concern for me as I think about the prospect of getting even a ‘mild’ case of omicron.”

While some general symptoms, like loss of smell and taste, appear less common with omicron, Gronvall said, “we just don’t know if people with that variant will suffer long COVID. We just haven’t had enough time to tell.”

Where did COVID-19 come from?

Experts are still not certain how COVID-19 emerged. The prevailing theory is that it leaped from an animal to a human. The first symptoms of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan among people who either worked or lived near Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, an open-air “wet market” that sold fresh beef, poultry, fish and produce. 

According to numerous sources, including a June 2021 study in Scientific Reports, the market also traded in exotic animals as pets and food, including badgers, hedgehogs, civets and porcupines. 

Others, however, claim that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in a lab — with a naturally occurring or human-engineered virus infecting a researcher, who spread it to others. While there has been no solid evidence to back the lab-leak theory, former President Donald Trump and his supporters pushed the lab-origin theory through 2020. 

“There’s a lot of people using this as a vehicle for other agendas,” Gronvall said. “And certainly the Chinese have been lying.” Government officials originally claimed that there were no contraband animals present at the market, she added, but researchers looking for a separate tick-borne disease photographed many illegal animals there, “stuffed together in close quarters, in poor health and stress conditions, in the months before cases were identified.”

“People are looking to blame [someone]”They aren’t looking for a very human and plausible explanation, but the virus identified in the lab isn’t quite close to what eventually spread around the world.”

Researchers are unlikely to find the exact animal culprit, as the Chinese government closed the South China market and removed all evidence at about the same time that COVID cases were associated with it, Grombal said. ..

“It wasn’t like the 2003 SARS. These palm civets It was all infected there and it was pretty quick, “she said.

To find out more about the emergence of COVID-19 this summer Directed by President Joe Biden Federal intelligence agencies “double their efforts” to investigate the origin of the virus.

For the third year of illness, what we know is that we have a drug cabinet of tools — vaccination When Antiviral drug — I never knew COVID-19 when I first learned about it.For more information, this is what we know modern When Pfizer With vaccine booster How to choose which one to get..

The information contained in this article is for educational and informative purposes only and is not intended for health or medical advice. Always consult your doctor or other qualified healthcare provider if you have any questions about your medical condition or health goals.