5 critical things disease experts got right about COVID

To cheering crowds, the first vaccine-packed trucks bound for U.S. destinations left Pfizer’s Michigan plant this past weekend. Elsewhere, planes ferrying COVID vaccines have landed. The vaccinations, similar to vaccinations that rid the U.S. of terrible scourges like polio and smallpox, have begun.

Though it will take many months to protect a significant amount of the populace — and perhaps return us to some “normality” sometime in 2021 — scientific ingenuity is responsible for the rapid creation of a vaccine (with more to come) that proved both safe and effective in major tests. Yet it’s not just the vaccine that should be celebrated. Beginning in March when the outbreak ramped up in the U.S., infectious disease experts had a strong grip on how the pathogen would spread — and how to slow its spread. (Regrettably, not everyone listened.)

This public health expertise should be acknowledged, not least because these experts (not Twitter hacks or presumptuous armchair scientists) will continue to have a critical role in the coming months and beyond. For example, those who know viruses best have urged the public to continue vigilant masking and social distancing, because the virus is still rampant in many of our communities. This guidance is particularly important today, when widespread scientific disinformation can often go, well, viral.

Here’s what infectious disease experts got right in 2020, and why it would behoove us to continue listening.

1. Masks are essential

In March, public health experts were initially hesitant to recommend that the general public wear masks, due to an unsettling shortage in medical-grade masks for health care workers. That changed. By early April, the CDC recommended that people wear cloth masks in public places where it’s difficult to social distance. U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams even demonstrated how people could make their own masks at home. (The CDC has continued updating its mask guidance.)

In July, as the research on masking mounted, the CDC said masks were “a critical tool” to slow the spread of the coronavirus. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield used stronger language, calling masks “weapons.”

“We are not defenseless against COVID-19,” Redfield said. “Cloth face coverings are one of the most powerful weapons we have to slow and stop the spread of the virus – particularly when used universally within a community setting. All Americans have a responsibility to protect themselves, their families, and their communities.”

The science was right. To illustrate:

• Two infected, symptomatic hairstylists in Missouri exposed 139 customers to the virus. But both the stylists and customers wore masks. There were no reported cases in these customers, and of 67 customers tested, no one tested positive. 

• In Kansas, counties that instituted a mask mandate saw cases drop by six percent. But in counties with no mandate, cases rose by 100 percent.

2. The coronavirus thrives on people being careless

Infectious disease experts knew the coronavirus would thrive, and continue thriving, in places where people gathered, specifically without masks and indoors. 

“This is a virus that we know is very happy to take advantage of people being careless,” Dr. Vince Silenzio, an M.D. and professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health, told Mashable in May.

Following the Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota in August, the CDC found at least 51 people brought the virus back to Minnesota, in addition to 35 more cases among people those attendees later infected. A March “soirée” in upscale Westport, Connecticut, became a superspreader event. In Florida in June, a health care worker and her friends went out partying at a pub: 16 of the partiers tested positive, in addition to seven bar employees.

“It has everyone on the planet to attack.”

The virus can spread easily when people act carelessly (not wearing masks and social distancing) because most of our immune systems haven’t yet seen this virus before. Lacking immune defenses, we’re hugely vulnerable (until we’re vaccinated).

“It has everyone on the planet to attack,” Dan Janies, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who researches viruses, told Mashable in May.

3. Summer wasn’t ever going to stop the pandemic

In March, President Donald Trump claimed the virus would go away as temperatures began to warm.

Nope.

Rather, research suggested warmer, more humid conditions could have a relatively small impact on slowing the spread of the coronavirus. One reason is the coronavirus’ shell, made of fats (called lipids), could be more vulnerable to warmer temperatures. So, for example, the virus might not survive as long on a doorknob. “But that won’t stop someone from giving it to someone else,” David Mushatt, the infectious disease section chief at Tulane University School of Medicine, told Mashable in May. (He referenced how the virus can easily be passed directly between people in close contact, even just by talking, meaning the virus has little to no time to break apart and deactivate outside the body.)

Humid air, too, could play a role in hindering the coronavirus’ ability to spread. There’s evidence, for example, the flu virus loses some of its ability to infect people when it travels through humid air (humidity is common in many places over the summer.)

Yet the coronavirus proved resilient in warmer countries. “The virus has just run rampant in Brazil,” noted Janies, of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “SARS-CoV-2 can certainly transmit in warm, summer-like conditions.” 

The U.S. experienced its second surge of the outbreak over the summer.

WATCH: What you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine

4. The Trump White House would likely start spreading the virus

On April Fools Day, President Donald Trump crowded behind a White House briefing room lectern with the U.S. Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, and others. No one wore masks. Months later, the virus would eventually flourish in the White House. 

“It is only a matter of time before one of them becomes ill with coronavirus given this behavior,” Jason Farley, a nurse practitioner in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Schools of Nursing and Medicine, told Mashable. 

“It is possible for viruses to be released into the air from just talking and breathing,” added Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne disease transmission at Virginia Tech. 

After numerous White House events, including a largely maskless September “superspreader event” in the Rose Garden, the president, the first lady, multiple senators, and many others were infected. 

The 74-year-old president was hospitalized. He recovered after receiving oxygen and a then-rare medical cocktail which included a drug (not available to the public at the time) developed with the help of cells taken from a human fetus.  

5. Patience

Infectious disease experts knew that a safe and effective vaccine, or vaccines, was the way out of this COVID nightmare. But they also stressed that, even if vaccine developments went well, it would still take until sometime around winter (at the earliest), for vaccinations to begin. They were right. Now distribution has started, though there’s a long road ahead.

This means we must continue using our other weapons — namely social distancing and masking —  against the virus. “We need patience,” Michael Kinch, the director of the Center for Drug Discovery at Washington University in St. Louis, told Mashable in June. “We are all so impatient to get back to some degree of normalcy, and we have to recognize that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the  National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, expects adults who aren’t health care workers or vulnerable people with health conditions to start getting vaccinated in April 2021. The goal is to achieve herd immunity by vaccination. This means enough people (perhaps around 70 percent) eventually become immune so the virus can’t jump through the population, from host to host to host. Once the infection rate is low in society, things can return to more normality.

We’re fortunate to be alive in the 21st century, an era of accelerating medical ingenuity, when it’s possible to defend ourselves against many infectious diseases. We can avoid much suffering and despair.

Yet, however patient we must be through the coming months, disease experts also know this coronavirus episode won’t nearly be the end of pandemic human diseases. We all should take heed, for whenever the next outbreak arrives. 

“The history of humanity is punctuated by pandemics,” Dr. Richard Gunderman, an M.D. and medical historian at Indiana University, told Mashable this summer. “This is just another chapter in that big volume.”

“To talk about a post-pandemic world is naive,” he added.