Five years after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, experts have been assessing what went wrong, what went right, the current state of the disease, and what to expect going forward. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Bill Hanage is among those who weighed in.
In a March 14 New York Times article, Hanage, associate professor of epidemiology, commented on measures such as school closures and lockdowns, which caused a great deal of controversy. “Whatever people did in 2020, before folks were vaccinated, saved millions of lives,” Hanage said. “If we had done nothing, truly done nothing at all, things would have been much, much worse.”
Regarding masks, he noted that several flawed studies, combined with the politics of personal freedom, contributed to a culture war regarding their use—particularly by children. He said he worries about what will happen if there’s another respiratory outbreak. “I feel quite anxious that a whole constituency has already discarded masks,” he said.
The lackluster uptake of COVID boosters also concerns Hanage. According to the CDC, only a quarter of adults over age 65 received the latest booster as of the end of 2024. But the SARS-CoV-2 virus is expected to continue to produce waves of infections, and COVID still poses a serious threat to certain groups, including older adults, those with medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, those with weakened immune systems, and those who haven’t been vaccinated. Said Hanage in a March 13 Washington Post article, “It’s desperately unfortunate that we’ve gotten to this point where so many people who could have been protected are not.”
Hanage told the Post that surveillance of the disease—mostly done via measuring amounts of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater and using genomic sequencing to track new variants—is another concern, because it has decreased as reporting mandates have been reduced. “We’re seeing a general, historical turning away from infectious diseases right now,” he said. “If you stop monitoring what’s going on in the wild, you increase the chance that something unexpectedly comes along and bites you.”
Read the New York Times article: Science Amid Chaos: What Worked During the Pandemic? What Failed?
Read the Washington Post article: Five years since the pandemic began, covid may now be endemic, experts say
