Covid 2020 study already projected restrictions until 2022

“Intermittent social distancing strategies may need to be employed through 2022 to prevent the novel coronavirus from continuing to jeopardize healthcare systems around the world.”

That’s how a report from the sheet of April 14, 2020, in the first months of the Covid pandemic, telling about a research published in the journal Science. The study was signed by a team led by Marc Lipsitch, from the department of epidemiology at Harvard University.

This work, based on data from Sars-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses, built models that simulated possible scenarios for the evolution of Covid over the years, until 2025.

On social media, the study and the news about it were met with skeptical reactions, mockery and, at times, a tone of concern.

“Kkkkkkk calm down there kkkkkkk joke ready right until 22”, read a comment on Twitter from sheet. “There are mentally ill leftist scientists”, claimed another profile on the social network.

This Friday (25), Brazil completes two years since the confirmation of its first case of Covid. At that time, the country became the first in Latin America to have a patient with the new virus, which until then had killed around 2,700 people worldwide. Two years later, the global death toll already exceeds 5.9 million.

Similar reactions were also present in a post about the same study by Atila Iamarino, doctor of virology and columnist for the sheet.

“Well, obviously that’s not going to happen,” said one person. “Hi Attila, did you see the study that says that scientific disseminator who disseminates absurd scenarios as truths without reading properly would deserve to be kicked in the bag until it becomes a basketball?”, criticized another.

“Here comes the alarmist!”, added another internet user.

Recently, Iamarino’s 2020 tweet was recalled, and several profiles began to ironically respond to posts that doubted at the time that we would still be, in 2022, with restrictions by Covid.

Iamarino says the 2020 tweet made him realize that he had pierced the “bubble” of science communication and was speaking to a wider audience. In the scientific environment in which it normally circulates, says the publisher, “what this article discusses is nothing new”, but a formal and revised version of what was known and the seriousness of the situation.

Part of the criticism of Iamarino’s tweets concerned his first post, in which he stated that he would read the study more calmly later, “but the conclusions are already tense”. This finding was followed by a “thread” showing details of the research.

“Those who were willing to accept that Covid was a problem felt bad for understanding the scale of the problem, and those who were not willing to understand it as a political attack,” says Iamarino.

At that time, the world was still in the early stages of the pandemic. Although there was already some information about Sars-CoV-2, the uncertainty was still very high.

To give you an idea, masks — a protection now considered basic and essential — only became mandatory in the state of São Paulo in the month after the publication of the Science study.

The WHO (World Health Organization) had only declared Covid a pandemic a month earlier.

Vitor Mori, a research physicist at the University of Vermont (USA) and a member of the Covid-19 BR Observatory, recalls that at the time, people in general imagined that the pandemic would not go very far — or they strongly wanted to believe it.

But part of the noise generated by the article at that time, he reckons, may also have been a misunderstanding of the idea of ​​”intermittent” interventions, as the study mentions.

“At the time, many people interpreted that we would be in the scenario of total closure that we lived in March/April for five years. I think that was more what scared people”, says Mori.

At that time, the future behavior of Sars-CoV-2 was unclear and the duration of the immunity acquired by the infection was not known.

Considering the burden on health systems that Covid has already shown to be capable of causing and the lack of drugs and vaccines, the study outlined future scenarios with intermittent distancing measures. They would be “on” and “off” from certain levels of contamination, in order to prevent the collapse of health systems – something that is very reminiscent of what we have experienced in recent years.

With the data it had at the time, the study estimated that Sars-CoV-2 could cause outbreaks at any time of year, something we’ve seen over time. And he pointed out that if immunity to the virus was short (which we know, in fact, it is), annual outbreaks were expected.

The researchers even indicated that they had considered that immunity against the disease could last at least two years, “but social distancing measures may need to be extended if immunity to Sars-CoV-2 wanes more quickly”. Today we know that protection starts to drop in a few months, especially for cases of infection, and with less force for serious cases and deaths.

“What this study did was not say that it would last. It gave an idea of ​​how long this ‘last’ would be”, summarizes Iamarino.

The surprise on the part of the people was a reflection of the lack of communication about the problem that was being faced and what was to come.

“We were at the time of closing announcements for 15 days. [da gravidade] existed, the failure was in the communication to say that what we were going to face was not a light race, but a marathon”, he says.

For Mori, it was a bucket of cold water when the weakening of immunity from previous infections began to become clear, something that became more evident at the end of 2020, close to the explosion of cases in Manaus.

The tragedy in Amazonas, caused by the emergence of the gamma variant, showed that new, more problematic strains could emerge — something that until then was uncertain.

Looking at the study today, Mori points out the difficulty of communicating uncertainties, considering a context in which increasingly immediate answers were sought (and still are sought).

“Usually communicating uncertainty is much less attractive than a confident speech saying that X or Y will happen”, he says, remembering that the state of the pandemic is linked to human behavior and the interventions carried out.

The physicist also points out a certain misunderstanding about the usefulness of models: they are not exactly used to “predict the future”, but rather to present scenarios, possible impacts of interventions and uncertainties – points addressed in the study published in Science.

Currently, for example, there is a greater understanding that distancing measures do not need to be totally restrictive and that there are forms of application that have less of an impact on daily life, points out the member of the Covid-19 BR Observatory.

Even with this evolution during the pandemic, there are still risks on the horizon, says Iamarino. “We have the worldwide risk of people being tired and the economic pressure to say that everything is fine, because it is not if you compare it to endemic diseases”, he says, in contrast to diseases such as dengue and seasonal flu, which kill a lot of people. less people.

Dengue, for example, led to 6,429 deaths from 2008 to 2019. Currently, even with a significant portion of the population vaccinated (but still with few people with the booster dose), Covid kills in a similar volume in about a week, after the emergence of the omicron variant.

“What naturalized disease is this?”, asks Iamarino.