COVID-19: Lost opportunities and lessons for the future
Abstract
Humanity has witnessed outbreaks since millennia, from limited epidemics to universal pandemics that wiped millions of lives and changed the course of civilizations. The advent of vaccines has eradicated some of the serious human pathogens and attenuated many others. However, pandemics are still a fact of our modern world, as we continue to have pandemics as ravaging as HIV and as alarming as severe acute respiratory syndrome, Ebola, and Middle East respiratory syndrome. The outbreak of COVID-19 with exponential curves racing to the 3 million confirmed cases should not have been a surprise. However, we seemed to ignore the past.[1,2] Unfortunately, COVID-19 is not the world’s last pandemic and we have to learn what we have missed, and how to avoid the failures. In this article, we try to summarize the lost opportunities as well as the lessons learned, hoping we can do better in the future.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).