2 years into the Covid pandemic: 5 lessons learned about vaccines, variants, infection and remote work

It has been two years since the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that Covid-19 was officially a pandemic.

Since that March 11, 2020, the world has changed at incredible speed — from the way we work to the ways to prevent disease.

Here are five lessons we’ve learned since the beginning of the pandemic.

1. mRNA vaccines work and can be made very quickly

As soon as the pandemic started, researchers started racing to make a vaccine that could protect people against Covid-19.

Some of the pharmaceutical companies decided to bet on a type of technology that had never resulted in a vaccine approved for human use — mRNA.

The risk paid off. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were able to develop Covid vaccines faster than any other lab. And they used precisely the mRNA.

But this investment also opened the door to a whole range of new treatments, which could use this same technology in the future.

In short, this type of vaccine takes a small piece of genetic code, mRNA, and coats it in fat. This material is absorbed by our cells.

Subsequently, this serves as an “instruction manual” for the cells themselves to manufacture a small part of the virus: the spicule. This structure, also known as the S protein, is responsible for connecting to cell receptors and initiating infection.

This fragment is not harmful to health, but the body’s immune system can recognize it and develop an effective response if the coronavirus tries to invade the body. Check out more details about this process in the infographic below.

As mentioned above, mRNA has the potential to be used in many other ways.

In addition to helping to develop vaccines against other viruses, such as HIV, influenza and Zika, this technology can still be used to train the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells, to create the proteins that people’s cells lack. with cystic fibrosis, or to teach the defense system of a patient with multiple sclerosis to stop attacking the nervous system.

Research on mRNA-based treatments has been ongoing for decades, but Covid vaccines are the first opportunity this platform has worked in practice. And that success will drive new research that could change the lives of millions of people.

2. Covid spreads through the air much more easily than we initially thought

About four months after the first discoveries about Covid, the WHO (World Health Organization) posted on Twitter: “FACT: Covid-19 is NOT airborne”.

At the time, experts representing the entity did not advise people to wear masks.

“There is no specific evidence to suggest that the mass use of masks by the population has any particular benefit,” said Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program in early 2020.

“We do not recommend wearing masks unless you are sick,” added Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead on Covid-19.

But what has been learned since the outbreak began has greatly changed those initial impressions. The WHO now says that people should “make wearing a mask a normal part of life when being around other individuals”.

Over time, evidence has emerged that the coronavirus is not just transmitted by large droplets of saliva or mucus that are suspended in the air for a short time after someone coughs or sneezes, or through contact with a contaminated surface. The WHO declared that the pathogen “can also be spread by aerosols”—much smaller particles, which remain “traveling” through the air for much longer.

In an editorial, the specialized journal British Medical Journal stated, “In many situations, people are much more likely to be exposed to the virus by inhaling it directly, rather than through large droplets that land in the eyes, nostrils or lips.”

“The transmission of SARS-CoV-2 [o coronavírus responsável pela pandemia atual] after contact with surfaces is now considered relatively minimal,” the text continues.

The article also brought examples of individuals who had Covid and infected others who were more than 2 m away, or who caught the virus in an environment where an infected person was present minutes or hours earlier.

“In March [de 2020], people were calling me to ask how long they needed to leave the can of beans in the bleach before I could bring them into the house. Everyone was hypervigilant and hyperparanoid,” recalls Paula Cannon, professor of molecular microbiology and immunology at the University of Southern California’s School of Medicine.

“We have since learned that airborne viruses in poorly ventilated closed spaces — emitted while speaking, singing or breathing by infected people without a mask — is the likely cause of most transmissions and the reason why bars and restaurants without ventilation are so risky.”

Washing hands and cleaning surfaces are still good habits to stay in the routine, but there is now much more emphasis on wearing masks and ventilation.

3. Working from home is here to stay

Millions of people around the world have been instructed to work from home during the pandemic.

This reality is something that would not have been technically possible a few years ago, but Covid has shown that using tools like video calling is accessible to many. And that could change the way millions of us work.

Twitter made headlines around the world in May 2020 when it announced, “Our employees can now work from home forever. The last few months have proven that we can make this work.”

However, the social media giant added that employees need to be in “a role and situation that allows them to work from home”.

But it’s not just tech companies that want to effect this change.

A survey by the consultancy Enterprise Technology Research of 1,200 companies showed that the percentage of individuals worldwide who work permanently from home is expected to have doubled in 2021.

And this scenario is something many employees want to see happen in practice as well.

In a global survey of more than 200,000 people in 190 countries, Boston Consulting found that 89% of respondents expected to be able to work from home for some time. Before the pandemic, this rate was 31%.

This growth of home office fans includes people who do manual work and manufacturing and expect to be able to perform at least some of the tasks without leaving home.

But for many individuals, who are in low-wage jobs and little stability, opportunities to work more flexible may be limited, which further increases inequalities.

4. The pandemic hit the most vulnerable people​

The world is an unequal place and the pandemic has deepened these differences even further.

In the UK, a UK Biobank study found that in the poorest part of the country, 11.4% of people had Covid. In the more affluent areas, this rate was 7.8%.

The research team also found that minorities were disproportionately affected, something that has also been observed in the US.

In New York, 2020 data showed that Hispanics and blacks accounted for 34% and 28% of Covid deaths, respectively, despite making up 29% and 22% of the population.

A survey carried out in California showed that non-Hispanic black patients had a 2.7 times greater risk of hospitalization compared to white patients.

Elsewhere, precise data on the social effects of Covid are lacking, but globally one of the biggest disparities is revealed in vaccination rates.

In middle- and high-income countries, about 70% of the population is fully vaccinated, according to the website. Our World in Data. That percentage drops to just 4% in low-income nations. And even in lower-middle-income countries, the rate is still just 32%.

As medical authorities in wealthier places hand out booster shots to deal with new threats such as the omicron variant, the deadly consequences of the slow vaccination campaign in less developed countries could become even more dangerous.

5. Not sure when (and if) Covid will stop being an issue

Herd immunity became a buzzword at the start of the pandemic — the idea was that if enough people developed antibodies against the coronavirus, either through “natural” infection or vaccination, Covid would become a threat. smaller.

This scenario seems increasingly difficult to achieve. The point is that our immune system response slows down over time, which is one of the reasons that many places have indicated booster shots.

According to Shabir Madhi, dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences and professor of vaccination at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, the immune response after infection or vaccination lasts approximately six to nine months.

While vaccines remain effective in protecting against severe forms of the disease, they do not appear to prevent infection or transmission of the coronavirus (even if people do not show any symptoms).

“With the vaccines we have, even if the transmission is reduced, the concept of herd immunity makes no sense,” says doctor Salvador Peiró, from the Fisabio Research Institute in Valencia, Spain, to BBC Mundo, the Spanish-language service. from the BBC.

And it is also worth remembering that the virus has a great capacity for transformation. With this, new variants emerge, and some of them are even more transmissible and manage to escape vaccines.

The variants also reinforced the idea that we will likely have to “live” with the virus as it evolves, updating vaccines regularly. In this scenario, highly vaccinated countries will continue on something like normality, even knowing that while some people get sick, health systems will no longer be overwhelmed.

The rise of the omni in recent months has further messed with this scenario, as even some of the countries with the best vaccination rates have had to reintroduce social distancing measures and require people to receive booster shots.

Worldwide, there is no consensus on where we currently find ourselves in the pandemic. Some countries, like the UK and Denmark, have completely abandoned restrictions, while others, like China, continue to maintain a policy of having no Covid cases.

READ MORE ON BBC