Lessons from COVID-19
Article Sidebar
Downloads
Submit your own article
Register as an author to reserve your spot in the next issue of the Medical Research Archives.
Author RegistrationJoin the Society
The European Society of Medicine is more than a professional association. We are a community. Our members work in countries across the globe, yet are united by a common goal: to promote health and health equity, around the world.
Join Europe’s leading medical society and discover the many advantages of membership, including free article publication.
MembershipMain Article Content
Abstract
COVID-19 was one of the costliest and deadliest pandemics in the recent history of pandemics. Despite many warnings, the world was not prepared for it. The complexity of the nature of the virus and weak national health systems made monitoring of its progress difficult, despite the leadership that the World Health Organization displayed. This paper reviews the origins of COVID-19 and the human and financial costs of its spread, even among developed countries. Vaccines were an important innovation emerging from the tragedy that illustrated the importance of international cooperation between developed and developing countries and offered important lessons for the future. This paper makes the case for continued development and investment of health systems both in developing and developed countries as a critical pillar of development.
Article Details
The Medical Research Archives grants authors the right to publish and reproduce the unrevised contribution in whole or in part at any time and in any form for any scholarly non-commercial purpose with the condition that all publications of the contribution include a full citation to the journal as published by the Medical Research Archives.
References
2. Higgins-Dunn, N. Bill Gates: Coronavirus may be 'once-in-a-century pathogen we've been worried about'. CNBC Health and Science 2020 February 28. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/28/bill-gates-says-coronavirus-may-be-once-in-a-century-pathogen.html
3. Gates, Bill. Responding to Covid-19 – A-Once-in-a-Century Pandemic? N Engl J Med 2020;382(18):1677-1689. doi: 10.1056/NEJMp2003762.
4. Gates, Bill. The next outbreak? We're not ready. TED2015. https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_the_next_outbreak_we_re_not_ready?language=en
5. Larnaud, Natacha. Bill Gates warned of a deadly pandemic for years—and said we wouldn't be ready to handle it. CBS News 2020 March 19. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-bill-gates-epidemic-warning-readiness/
6. Munich Security Conference Panel Discussion. Get Well Soon: Finding a Way Out of the Pandemic. 2022 February 18. https://securityconference.org/en/msc-2022/agenda/event/get-well-soon-finding-a-way-out-of-the-pandemic/
7. Cutler DM, Summers LH. The COVID-19 pandemic and the $16 trillion virus. JAMA. 2020;324(15):1495-1496.
8. Velavan TP, Meyer CG. The COVID-19 epidemic. Trop Med Int Health 2020;25:278-280.
9. Fehr AR, Perlman S. Coronaviruses: an overview of their replication and pathogenesis. Methods Mol Biol. 2015;1282:1-23.
10. Lu R, Zhao X, Li J, Niu P, Yang B, Wu H, et al. Genomic characterization and epidemiology of 2019 novel coronavirus: implications for virus origins and receptor binding. Lancet 2020;395:565-574.
11. Cascella M, Rajnik M, Cuomo A, Dulebohn SC, Napoli RD. Features, Evaluation and Treatment Coronavirus (COVID-19). Treasure Island, FL: Stat Pearls Publishing; 2020.
12. Woo PCY, Lau SKP, Lam CSF, Lau CCY, Tsang AKL, Lau JHN, et al. Discovery of seven novel mammalian and avian coronaviruses in the genus delta coronavirus supports bat coronaviruses as the gene source of alphacoronavirus and beta coronavirus and avian coronaviruses as the gene source of gamma coronavirus and delta coronavirus. J Med Virol. 2012;86:3995-4008.
13. Tyrrell DA, Bynoe ML. Cultivation of viruses from a high proportion of patients with colds. Lancet 1966;176-177.
14. Korber B, Fischer WM, Gnanakaran S, Yoon H, Theiler J, Abfalterer W, et al. Tracking changes in SARS-CoV-2 spike: evidence that D614G increases infectivity of the COVID-19 virus. Cell 2020;182:812-827.e19.
15. Guo YR, Cao QD, Hong ZS, Tan YY, Chen SD, Jin HJ, et al. The origin, transmission and clinical therapies on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak an update on the status. Mil Med. 2020;7:1-10.
16. Hoffmann M, Kleine-Weber H, Krüger N, Müller M, Drosten C, Pohlmann S, et al. The novel coronavirus 2019 (2019-nCoV) uses the SARS-coronavirus receptor ACE2 and the cellular protease TMPRSS2 for entry into target cells. Biorxiv.2020; doi:10.1101/2020.01.31.929042.
17. Sola I, Almazan F, Zuniga S, Enjuanes L. Continuous and discontinuous RNA synthesis in coronaviruses. Annu Rev Virol. 2015;2:265-268.
18. Galloway SE, Paul P, MacCannell DR, Johansson MA, Brooks JT, MacNeil A. et al. Emergence of SARS-CoV-2 B117 lineage – United States. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2021;70:95-99.
19. Volz E, Mishra S, Chand M, Barrett JC, Johnson R, Geidelberg L. et al. Assessing transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 lineage B117 in England. Nature 2021;593:266-269.
20. Cerutti G et al. Increased resistance of SARS-CoV-2 variant P.1 to antibody neutralization. bioRxiv. 2021;29:747-751.e4.
21. Tegally H, Wilkinson E, Giovanetti M, Iranzadeh A, Fonseca V, Giandhari J, et al. Detection of a SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern in South Africa. Nature 2021;592:438-443.
22. Faria NR, Mellan TA, Whittaker C, Claro IM, Candido DDS, Mishra S. et al. Genomics and epidemiology of a novel SARS-CoV-2 lineage in Manaus, Brazil. medRxiv 2021.doi:10.1126/science.abh2644.
23. WHO. Enhancing response to Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant. 2021. https://www.who.int/news/item/28-11-2021-update-on-omicron.
24. Sankaran V. First image of omicron coronavirus variant shows many more mutations in area that interacts with human cells. Independent 2021 Nov 29. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/omicron-covid-variant-mutations-image-b1965780.html
25. Zhang W, Davis BD, Chen SS, Sincuir Martinez JM, Plummer JT, Vail E. Emergence of a novel SARS-CoV-2 variant in Southern California. JAMA 2021;325:1324-1326.
26. The EU’s covid-19 recovery fund has changed how Europe spends money. The Economist 2022 May https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/05/26/the-eus-covid-19-recovery-fund-has-changed-how-europe-spends-money?utm_medium=email.internal-newsletter.np&utm_source=salesforce-marketing-cloud&utm_campaign=espresso.US&utm_content=-the-eu-s-scramble-to-find-new-money-2023-12-08&utm_term=12/08/23
27. WHO COVID-19 Dashboard Data. https://data.who.int/dashboards/covid19/data?n=c.