Catastrophic – Earlybirds Invest

For most people, the Covid-19 pandemic, which officially began five years ago this month, marked their first encounter with case counts and N-95 masks and lockdown orders.

I was a young reporter for Time magazine in Hong Kong in early spring 2003, when we started getting reports about a strange new sickness spreading in southern China, just across the border. On March 15, exactly 22 years ago today, that sickness was given a name by the World Health Organization: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

The SARS outbreak didn’t get much attention in the US because the country only had a small number of cases, and the worst of it overlapped with the invasion of Iraq. But back in Hong Kong, which became an epicenter of the outbreak, we had no idea when or if it would end.

Looking back on those days now, it feels like a dry run for what the entire world would experience less than two decades later with another coronavirus. Overnight, all of Hong Kong wore surgical masks. Airports, hotels, and restaurants were abandoned.

At the Time offices in the city, editors sweating through uncomfortable N-95 masks debated sending some staff to work from home, to keep the magazine going if our building were to be closed. I interviewed scientists about the possibility of a vaccine or treatment, and was told that if one were needed, it would certainly take years for it to be developed.

We ended up getting lucky with SARS. The coronavirus that caused it turned out to be far less infectious than it first appeared, and the outbreak ended up petering out — though not before more than 8,000 people were sickened and 774 died around the world.

With Covid, of course, we were not that lucky. More than 7 million people have been confirmed to have died from Covid so far, a number that is both still rising and almost surely an undercount. The political, social, and educational side effects of the pandemic were enormous, and are still playing out. It was, simply put, a global catastrophe — one of the few events that is truly worthy of that name.

So why in the world would I put Covid in a newsletter that’s supposed to be about good news?

A Covid pandemic before 2020 would have been far worse

Having lived through and covered both SARS and Covid, I sometimes like to run a thought experiment: How would we have responded back in 2003 if SARS had turned out to be as dangerous as Covid?

Think back to 2003. Smartphones didn’t exist, and even laptops were less common. Video-calling was essentially nonexistent — if you told someone you were going to “Zoom” with them, you would have gotten very strange looks.

What this all means is that remote work and remote schooling and telemedicine — which, as problematic as they all turned out to be, did keep the economy, education, and medical care moving forward during the pandemic — would have essentially been impossible. By one estimate, without remote work, US GDP would have declined twice as much as it ultimately did in that first year of the pandemic. All those Zoom meetings and cloud documents were a literal economic lifeline.

Or take the virus itself. It was months after the first cases of SARS before the coronavirus causing it was successfully identified by scientists. I still remember visiting Hong Kong University’s Queen Mary Hospital in April 2003, and peering through an electron microscope at the virus’s distinctive, sun-like corona. In Covid, thanks to vast improvements in the speed of genetic sequencing, full genomes of the virus were being distributed well before the world was fully aware of what Covid was.

Or vaccines. In 2003, early work on mRNA vaccine technology was only beginning, and BioNTech — the company that was responsible for the groundbreaking research on mRNA vaccines — wouldn’t be founded for another five years..

Before Covid, it took anywhere from five to 15 years — if not longer — to develop a vaccine for a new virus. Had we needed one during SARS, we would have almost certainly been in for a long wait. But during Covid, the first vaccine candidates were produced by Pfizer-BioNTech on March 2, 2020 — less than two months after work on the vaccines had begun. Sandra Lindsay, a nurse in New York, received the first Covid shot on December 14, 2020, less than nine months later.

And while advances in science were the first necessary steps, the US government, for all its flaws, acted with impressive urgency and ambition.

We never would have received vaccines as quickly without the genius of Operation Warp Speed. By supporting the simultaneous development of multiple vaccine candidates, the parallel execution of multiple stages of vaccine development and trials, and by guaranteeing a market for the vaccines with billions of dollars, Operation Warp Speed lived up to is name.

Beyond the science, the bipartisan relief bills kept poverty from spiking during those first, terrible months of the pandemic. In fact, poverty actually dropped in 2021 compared to the years before the pandemic, with child poverty falling by more than half.

Don’t forget what we accomplished

I realize that almost no one wants to look back at the Covid pandemic, and certainly not with pride. The subsequent virus variants and new waves increasingly evaded even our best vaccines, keeping the pandemic going for years while eroding belief in them. Division over the public health decisions made during the pandemic, from mask requirements to school closures, still linger, poisoning the political atmosphere. Perhaps hundreds of millions of people are experiencing the effects of long Covid, their every day a reminder of the pandemic’s toll. The collective trauma we suffered is still with us.

And yet, I worry that all that pain and anger will cause us to neglect the amazing accomplishments of those years. Not just the scientists and officials who got us those vaccines in record time, but the doctors and nurses who toiled endless hours on the front lines of the pandemic, or the essential workers who kept things going while the rest of us isolated. My fear is not just that we’ll forget that heroism, but that when the next pandemic comes — as it inevitably will — we’ll forget that we have shown the ability and the will to fight it.

On the five-year anniversary of the pandemic, there has been no shortage of articles about what we got wrong during Covid — and yes, in retrospect, we got many, many things wrong. I realize “it could have been worse” isn’t exactly the most stirring rallying cry after something as catastrophic as Covid.

But it’s still true, and we shouldn’t overlook the people whose work ensured it wasn’t.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

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