Some lessons from COVID remain unlearned

Five years ago, we suddenly were gripped by uncertainty and fear. The World Health Organization had just declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Broadway shuttered, sports stopped. Sunday marks five years since schools closed — for what was supposed to be two weeks.

In the following days, COVID-19 swept through New York City and Long Island, sending the state into lockdown. Essential workers kept serving through the most difficult of circumstances while the rest of us stayed home. Zoom became a household name. Many of us lost family members and dear friends. Heartbreakingly, we often were unable to be with them in their final moments.

More than 1.2 million Americans have died from COVID-19.

For all of us, the ground shifted in March 2020, forever changing aspects of our lives, in ways large and small, from our politics to our schools, from our workplaces to our health care system.

Most New Yorkers have moved on from those dark days. Others still struggle with pandemic-related impacts. Some accommodations we made have been abandoned. Others have become routine parts of our lives.

LESSONS UNLEARNED

We have learned many lessons along the way, but others we have yet to digest. Our hospitals are generally better prepared — with stockpiles of personal protective equipment that was in short supply back then, and with new procedures for isolating patients and protecting staff. But our nursing homes still don’t have the staff, resources or training to handle a future pandemic.

Governments have tried to improve information technology systems that too often failed, especially here in New York, when it came to critical processes like handling unemployment claims and vaccination scheduling. But the shortcomings remain vast. While schools found new ways to teach and meet student needs during lockdown, many young students still haven’t recovered from extensive learning loss, and schools have not figured out how to help them.

As for the virus itself, we understand so much more about COVID as it continues to evolve, but there are gaps in our knowledge, especially regarding the chronic and sometimes serious consequences of long COVID.

The pandemic also wreaked havoc on our public health system, starting with the deaths of first responders who contracted the virus, then mutating into a deep distrust of public health measures and science.

As the weeks passed, a better understanding of COVID led public health officials and scientists to shift guidelines and explanations. That fed public doubt, and the growing distrust in expertise quickly widened into an unwillingness to act for the benefit of the community as a whole. The pushback against lockdowns and masking morphed into a broader rejection of public health norms.

VACCINATION OPPOSITION

The most dangerous consequence was the increase in opposition to vaccination. Before the pandemic, the anti-vax movement was on the periphery. Now, it has become the unfortunate norm in some Long Island circles and beyond.

Incredibly, the anti-vaccine movement grew with the miraculously speedy development of the COVID vaccine and its unquestionable effectiveness. Defiance of COVID-19 vaccine mandates expanded to affect traditional vaccinations for diseases all but eradicated, like measles and polio. The diagnosis last week of measles in a Suffolk County infant too young to be vaccinated reminds us of who’s at risk when the importance of public health is widely ignored.

Recent efforts by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his colleagues to undermine vaccines and other public health measures are having an impact. Agency staffs are being decimated. Meetings of certain advisory panels have been canceled, leaving open the question of whether we’ll even have a flu vaccine during the next season. Even the debunked link between vaccines and autism is being relitigated. There are glimmers of a reckoning: Last week, President Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Dave Weldon for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director; Weldon’s anti-vax views ruined his chances of Senate confirmation.

Other lessons in preparedness remain to be learned. The Department of Agriculture had to scramble to rehire bird flu experts after they were fired, a move officials said initially was a mistake. Advocates correctly warn that the U.S. is unprepared for an expanded bird flu outbreak that could mutate and infect humans more severely. And what happens if the next pandemic is entirely different — something other than an airborne illness, for example? We must relearn what we knew in the past.

We need to practice the science and purge the politics and misinformation. We must respect the results of research and improve our public health infrastructure so facts and advice are given clearly and consistently and can be trusted.

Our memories from those early days of COVID are thick with meaning, from smaller moments like learning to bake bread with family and trying to make sure wireless connections hold for school and work, to larger ones like supporting our first responders and mourning the loss of loved ones.

But five years later, we’re still slow to turn most of those memories into actions, to learn the lessons necessary to protect us and sustain us during future pandemics. When the next one comes — and it will — we need to be ready.