science and covid 19 essay

UNESCO Science Report 2021

Science and the pandemic

During the Covid-19 pandemic, countries have turned to their scientific community for advice and practical solutions. Many governments have established ad hoc scientific committees to manage the crisis, enabling them to witness, first hand, the advantages of having local experts to monitor and control the progression of the virus. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the value of digital technologies in an emergency. It has heightened their use in areas such as education (distance learning) and health, with examples including telemedicine, use of drones to detect people in a crowd with a high body temperature or delivery by drone of medical samples for testing. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacted a heavy human and economic toll but it has also energized knowledge production systems.  

For instance, in October 2020, the World Health Organization reported that Africa accounted for about 13% of 1,000 new or modified existing technologies developed worldwide in response to the pandemic, close to its share of the global population (14%). Among these technologies, 58% involved digital solutions such as chatbots, self-diagnostic tools and contact-tracing apps. A further 25% of African solutions were based on three-dimensional (3D) printing and 11% on robotics. 

Governments have supported the bioscience industry, such as through advance purchase agreements to facilitate the rapid development of vaccines. Institutions in many countries have accelerated their approval processes for research project proposals in response to the crisis. Governments have provided incentives for small and medium-sized enterprises to tackle the pandemic. 

The Covid-19 crisis has recalled the desirability of strong linkages between the public and private sectors for the production of equipment such as lung ventilators, masks, medication and vaccines. Academics have worked with hospitals and local businesses to develop lung ventilators, for instance, which have been produced by local manufacturers who have repurposed their assembly lines.  

The pandemic has also given rise to an epidemic of misleading information designed to foment division, or ‘infodemic’, as the World Health Organization has termed it. This ‘infodemic’ has demonstrated the crucial need for independent, responsible and pluralistic media, in order to ensure that people have access to trustworthy and science-based information.  

The Covid-19 pandemic has radically transformed our way of life. The crisis may yet redefine scientific processes and science governance in unforeseen ways. It is likely to affect the next generation of researchers and the mechanisms by which science itself is funded’. 

Beyond science and technology, the Covid-19 crisis raises broad, fundamental questions, such as with regard to the role of the state in the economy, the reshoring of supply chains, the organization of work and the value of proximity. 

Two essays on the Covid-19 pandemic

Research on new or re-emerging viruses has surged during epidemics .

 With the year 2020 having been dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic, one might expect there to be a voluminous research record on new or re-emerging viruses that can infect humans. There is not. There were just 7 471 publications on this topic in 2019, 35% of which were produced by scientists in the USA alone. Global output on this broad topic progressed by just 2% per year between 2011 and 2019,  slower than global scientific publications overall: 3.8% per year. There are signs that research in this field has been reactive, not pro-active. 

Growth was much faster in individual countries which had to marshal science to cope with other viral outbreaks over this period. The 2014–2015 Ebola outbreak in Liberia and neighbouring Guinea and Sierra Leone stamped its mark on these countries’ scientific output, as did repeated Ebola outbreaks in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The same was true of the Zika virus, which reached epidemic proportions in Brazil between 2015 and 2018.

• View the figure on the right or in the report: Top 10 countries for growth in scientific publishing on new or re-emerging viruses, 2011–2019

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Infectious disease

How COVID-19 has changed the culture of science

C&EN spoke to researchers and scientific leaders about the good, the bad, and the uncertain ways that life has changed because of the pandemic, in the lab and beyond

By bethany halford , laura howes , andrea widener, january 25, 2021 | a version of this story appeared in volume 99, issue 3.

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The pandemic has cost lives and livelihoods, but many scientists C&EN spoke to were positive about the future. Here are some of the reasons why.

Science and scientists in the spotlight

Support nonprofit science journalism C&EN has made this story and all of its coverage of the coronavirus epidemic freely available during the outbreak to keep the public informed. To support us: Donate Join Subscribe

Ever since the first genome sequence of the novel coronavirus was released to the world in February 2020, science has been supercharged. The speed and volume of discovery over the past year have been remarkable, with researchers managing to unravel the molecular details of the virus, understand how it spreads and who is most at risk, and invent tests, drugs, and vaccines to tackle it. The public has seen what scientists can do under pressure.

Throughout 2020, clinical trial data regularly garnered headlines, and certain academics emerged as authoritative voices of the pandemic.

“There’s a group of people who have become almost household names,” says Holden Thorp, chemist and editor in chief of the Science family of journals. Early on, Pall Thordarson, a chemist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, became a viral sensation for explaining how something as simple as washing your hands can protect against infections. In Germany, podcasts about the pandemic by virologist Christian Drosten, who developed the first diagnostic test for SARS-CoV-2, became must-listens for the German-speaking public. And Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, emerged as the steady source of advice in the US and overseas—he also became a popular icon, with his image appearing on T-shirts, socks, and coffee mugs.

Scientists who spoke to C&EN believe that the reputation of the pharmaceutical industry, in particular, has improved during the pandemic, as the public closely followed the development of vaccines. Companies’ rapid mobilization also highlighted that science is collaborative, works across borders, and is performed by diverse teams. “Hopefully, this will be seen more unambiguously as a triumph for science,” Thorp says.

And the public has gotten an up-close view of the people who do science, says Freeman Hrabowski III , president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “This is a chance for the world, but particularly for those of us in American society, to see people who are from working- and middle-class families going to the top in science and helping humankind. This is an opportunity for our chemists and life scientists to be making the point that this work is for all of us—for women, for people of color, for first-generation college students—and you can make a difference.” The attention could inspire the next generation of scientists—hopefully a more diverse one.

People are influenced by their life experiences and what excites them, says Malika Jeffries-EL, a chemistry professor and associate dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Boston University. “We’re going to have a huge surge of interest in things like immunology and fields related to viruses and vaccine development.”

Science itself has advanced dramatically in the last year, with discoveries rolling out at breathtaking speed. Terms like “space race” have been used to describe the rapid development of vaccines, but Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health, points out that scientists also made impressive strides in developing diagnostics , establishing testing capacity, and expanding our fundamental understanding of the virus.

“We did science in ways that people did not think we could, driven by this sense of urgency, which we all say that every day counts,” Collins says. “This is a pandemic that is taking lives and destroying economies, and there’s no excuse for anybody arguing for delay.”

Collaborations and data sharing

The year 2020 also saw more scientists embrace preprints—articles published before peer review—and data sharing across borders and disciplines.

“The preprint server business has been given a giant boost from this,” says Derek Lowe, a pharmaceutical chemist and author of the popular In the Pipeline blog.

According to the Dimensions COVID-19 data set , researchers have published over 38,000 SARS-CoV-2 preprints since the beginning of 2020. James Wilsdon, a professor of research policy at the University of Sheffield, says the pandemic has shown that when “the stakes are really high,” researchers can work quickly and create better systems for disseminating data. The real question, he says, is whether those changes in publishing behavior will remain postpandemic.

More generally, researchers see the way that scientists have cooperated as a huge positive. Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine , for example, could not have been developed so quickly—it went from discovery to distribution in a mere 11 months—had the company not had a long-standing partnership with researchers at the NIH. And big pharma firms have been collaborating with one another to find novel antivirals for this pandemic and the next one, sharing expertise and data in unprecedented ways. Open-science collaborations have also sprung up between academic groups, such as the COVID Moonshot effort, which is screening potential antivirals at facilities in England and Israel.

Collins at the NIH says most of his time last year was spent “trying to bring together all of the partners that could accelerate progress, and making sure that any of the barriers to those kinds of partnerships got knocked down.” And researchers from all sectors “were completely willing to share and work together in fashions that traditionally have been more difficult.”

Related: Chemists rethink work travel

“I’m hoping that this emphasis on international collaborations will continue in the research community,” says Magdalena Skipper, editor in chief of Nature . “But I hope it will also be taken up as an example beyond the research community itself,” she adds, noting that while scientists have collaborated on a global scale, policy makers have worked much more locally.

Much of that collaboration has naturally occurred in the virtual world, opening up opportunities for partnerships that otherwise might not have materialized. As Marie Heffern of the University of California, Davis, points out, setting up a cross-institutional collaboration is now just a matter of arranging a video call. Group leaders can meet and discuss projects or take part in conferences they normally couldn’t have attended. At the same time, postdocs and students have been able to interact more readily with big-name academics through online meetings.

University of Michigan chemistry professor Alison Narayan points to a virtual biocatalysis meeting she set up with researchers at Merck & Co. and the University of Manchester. The regular meeting has grown to include almost 500 people and is “a wonderful platform for students to present their science,” Narayan says, adding that she wants to continue these meetings after the pandemic.

“When you have a pressing need, like the worst pandemic in 102 years, it does require organizing science in new, creative, and productive ways,” the NIH’s Collins says. “And that has been amazing to see happening and to have some role pushing forward.”

Flexibility and support at work

Stay-at-home orders forced a marked increase in flexible working, which in turn showed that work can still be accomplished when people are not in the lab. In the face of these challenges, scientists got creative about keeping up their work.

For some, working from home has increased productivity and raised awareness of other people’s personal challenges. “When you’re on a Zoom call, you see someone’s whole world,” Narayan says. That experience can be eye opening for mentors and colleagues and bring a person’s needs to the forefront.

Merck & Co. chemist Rebecca Ruck says flexible working has taught her and her colleagues how to be more creative. “I hope that affords people—men, women, everybody—greater flexibility in how they work,” she says. Luis Echegoyen, president of the American Chemical Society in 2020, says the productivity of his team at the University of Texas at El Paso actually increased, as members finally had the time for papers and review articles that had been waiting for someone to write them (ACS publishes C&EN). His small group published 15 articles or reviews in 2020, including 3 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society . “That’s an immediate, positive consequence of the pandemic in our group,” Echegoyen says.

Professors are also learning how to use technology to support student learning and to train the next generation of researchers. Where some in-person teaching was allowed, many universities prioritized lab sessions over classroom seminars or lectures, moving more instruction online. Where all teaching went remote, science departments adapted by designing lab work that could be done at home. Other professors built online versions of practical experiments.

Moving classes online with short notice was a daunting challenge that made building rapport and community more difficult—particularly for newer students who may have met their teachers only virtually. Professors say some students have understandably struggled with this shift, but online instruction can improve digital literacy and time management , thus helping prepare students for work after university.

Many teachers are taking a more “flipped classroom” approach by asking students to watch videos and read specific texts before class. The class is then used for active learning and problem solving rather than a lecture, says Mary Boyd, provost and chemistry professor at Berry College. She praises the community of educators that has built up to support best practices and online teaching strategies. “That’s been pretty great,” Boyd says.

Some of the pandemic’s negative impacts may be short lived, while others are likely to reverberate for years.

Science has long struggled to reflect the diversity of the world it serves. Less than 5% of people who earned PhDs in chemistry in the US in 2018 were Black, according to the Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity. And recent data show a dearth of people of color and women working as professors in chemistry departments at top schools. The pandemic has only amplified those problems. Because COVID-19 has disproportionately affected communities of color, many worry that it will prevent people from those communities from getting college or advanced degrees. And more women than men have been sidelined in their education and careers as they took on the lion’s share of extra childcare duties associated with lockdowns.

“The pandemic has been a magnifier of inequality,” Berry College’s Boyd says. Challenges range from finding a quiet workspace in small or overcrowded households to having to defer education altogether to help with family or to earn money, as many lost jobs. While much of the world has moved online for classes and conferences, those without reliable internet access or technology have often been left behind.

Zakiya S. Wilson-Kennedy, the assistant dean for diversity and inclusion and a chemistry education professor at Louisiana State University, agrees that the pandemic has magnified inequities. “The transition to online learning has offered this opportunity for disruptive innovation, but the ability to take advantage of this time is very economically driven,” she says

When Wilson-Kennedy considers the ways 2020 affected the culture of science, she points to not just the pandemic but the Black Lives Matter movement and the increase of deadly hurricanes resulting from climate change. “Black and Brown communities, economically disadvantaged folks, and our working poor are disproportionately impacted by all of these,” she says. Because of that, Wilson-Kennedy wonders how we will “cultivate the talents of young people who are passionate about answering these challenges, knowing that even right now, we have a host of folks who have talent but who have different levels of access to education.” If we are going to have sustainable change around supporting diversity in the scientific workforce and in academia, she says, “we have to be extremely intentional about it.”

“Universities were already starting to have a slow awakening about the fact that the status quo is not effectively serving everybody,” Boston University’s Jeffries-EL says. “I think people are starting to have an honest conversation about what is really the issue in the pipeline,” she adds. Sara D. Leonhardt, a professor of chemical ecology at Technical University of Munich, says, “The problems we had before—which were always there—will be even more severe in the future because of the pandemic. I think that’s the really ugly part.” Leonhardt organized an open letter signed by researchers in Germany who argue that the German government needs to support early-career researchers by listening to more-diverse sources of advice, prioritizing opening childcare, and committing to extra financial support in the wake of the pandemic. She is concerned there has been little awareness of how unequally the pandemic has affected different groups—specifically women, those with child- or elder-care duties, and people of color.

Even if the obvious effects of the pandemic on these scientists last only a year—fewer publications or grants, for instance—the impact could be dramatic, Science ’s Thorp says. As an example, he cites the 2008 recession , which derailed careers for years and pushed many out of science entirely. “Almost every time we’ve had some kind of severe problem, it’s always magnified whatever inequities were there to start.”

The next generation of scientists

Anyone who works at the bench knows that there’s just no way to make up for the time lost in the lab during this pandemic. And while that reality is tough on all bench scientists, the situation is particularly acute for assistant professors just starting their labs, postdoctoral scholars with contracts that are just a year or two long, and undergraduates who are missing out on laboratory experiences.

Heffern at UC Davis worries about how the pandemic lockdowns have upset her lab’s momentum. When you’re working toward tenure, such interruptions in research and creating a team can set back early-career researchers .

Related: International students deserve recognition and support

“Postdocs are all about productivity in a short period of time,” UTEP’s Echegoyen says. With such short contracts, these scientists are losing some of the most important years for establishing their careers. “The most disruptive part that I can see of this for science is the future,” he says.

Some fear that pandemic-related productivity gaps will be perceived poorly by funding agencies. “In the short term, obviously funders and others need to make sure we’re not unfairly discriminating against those who haven’t been pumping out grant proposals,” the University of Sheffield’s Wilsdon says.

Another fear is that budgets will shrink because of economic factors and that much of the remaining funding will be funneled into COVID-19-related work. “You can sort of frame the challenge now in terms of the dangers of COVID-ization of research funding,” Wilsdon says. There are questions about how to fund research as well as how to balance the funding so that important areas don’t lose out.

With summer research experiences and internships for undergraduate and high school students canceled for 2020 and likely for 2021, several researchers point to the lasting impact those lost opportunities for research experience will have on the chemistry pipeline. “That’s usually where the premed students decide they actually want to be chemists,” the University of Michigan’s Narayan says.

Merck’s Ruck echoes that concern. “Without that hands-on experience, will these students ever fall in love with chemistry?” she says. “I worry that that will have implications for the overall talent flow into the field.”

Politicization of science

Followers of the climate change movement know that politicization of science isn’t new. But the pandemic has made the human toll of this phenomenon much more immediate, with people refusing to wear masks on the advice of politicians and the White House suppressing scientific discourse.

“By politicizing science, we denied the fundamental tools that we needed to tackle a biological and social problem,” says Jeremy Levin, CEO of Ovid Therapeutics and chairman of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. We’re now seeing the consequence in loss of life, economic upheaval, and other untold suffering, he says. “I think the denial of the validity of science and the politicization of it will be held against us for decades to come.”

Thorp at Science says researchers haven’t done a good job of describing the scientific process to the public, which is why it’s been so easy for science to become politicized . Take the shifting guidance on face masks. Officials first advised against wearing them out of concern that supplies would become stretched and that the priority should be that health-care workers get masks. Then, as scientists learned more about the airborne transmission of COVID-19 and the ability for asymptomatic people to spread the disease, they urged people to wear masks to protect others. Later, scientists learned that masks also provide protection to the wearer.

“If you’re a scientist, that makes perfect sense,” Thorp says. “If you’re out there in the public, just consuming sound bites, that makes it look like we don’t know what we’re talking about. And that’s a product of the fact that it’s much easier to just tell people that science is this textbook full of stuff that you have to memorize and not a process and a way of thinking that’s carried out by people.”

Scientists haven’t done the hard work of explaining how the scientific method is connected to important scientific advances, Thorp says. Instead, he adds, “we bring them their new drug or their better Wi-Fi or their profitable companies.”

The Unknown

Not all the dramatic changes—positive or negative—might last. Experts weighed in on the biggest uncertainties.

Travel and meetings

Prepandemic, many principal investigators were rarely in the lab; they were often on the road, giving talks or attending meetings. The pandemic stopped travel overnight.

The University of Michigan’s Narayan had given 17 talks in the first 2 months of 2020 as part of her “tenure tour”—visiting schools before she applied for tenure. “What this has taught me is that I don’t need to be traveling constantly,” says Narayan, who now expects to be more selective about her travel. “That’s maybe better for me personally, and better for my family and my research group.”

Virtual talks have many advantages. More people can attend, including those who might not otherwise get to hear from a Nobel Prize winner or other high-profile scientists. They make it easier for smaller schools to get big-name speakers, are a vast saving for cash-strapped organizations, and are much better for the environment.

“In South America, we are far from everywhere,” says Ana Flávia Nogueira, a chemistry professor at the University of Campinas. So the move to virtual conferences has widened access for her students because they don’t have to pay for travel, and fees for online meetings tend to be lower. At the same time, she says, the most important aspect of attending conferences for her is the ability to make personal connections with other scientists with whom she might collaborate. That’s tough to do online. Nogueira thinks that the investments made in online meetings mean that many future conferences will be a hybrid of virtual and in-person events.

But “there are certain aspects of collaboration and connection that are much, much harder to achieve purely through online interaction,” the University of Sheffield’s Wilsdon says.

You can rarely see your audience on Zoom, and you can’t make the same personal connections with potential students or collaborators. That’s especially concerning for early-career scientists, who are supposed to be meeting people and building their lab’s reputation. “COVID has really made that quite difficult,” UC Davis’s Heffern says.

Online meetings are so easy to schedule that everyone does it. “In June and July it was an invitation a day,” Echegoyen at UTEP says. “You realize that all of a sudden people have gotten trigger happy.”

Lack of travel has also been a mixed bag for scientists who have family responsibilities—especially women. Less travel can mean more time with your family, but it can also make working harder if you are expected to do childcare. “If you are still at home, you’re expected to do all the home things even while you’re technically working because you’re at a conference,” Berry College’s Boyd says. “You don’t get the separation that you would get.”

So what is the fate of conferences? Boyd has yet to see a way to do virtual conferences well. The talks themselves are just as good—maybe better, she admits—but sitting in front of a screen all day is tiring. And “we miss the important part of attending a conference, which is the networking and getting to know other people,” she says.

But Merck’s Ruck says that in many cases, what individual scientists lose online is made up for by increased access for people who might not be able to travel.

In 2019, the Empowering Women in Organic Chemistry conference had 180 attendees at its inaugural, in-person event. In 2020, the online version attracted 800 people from all over the globe. Ruck, who helps organize that meeting, thinks that most conferences will be a hybrid of in-person and online going forward.

“I’m going to be very content to give many more talks from my living room,” Ruck says.

Echegoyen says it’s going to take a long time before people feel comfortable going to an event with 15,000 to 20,000 people, like a typical ACS meeting. But he thinks some new technology will make virtual meetings more palatable. “I think we’re going to come out of it changed, that’s for sure.”

Distanced lab culture

Almost all faculty and students were hit hard by the pandemic, but the work and productivity of lab scientists probably suffered most. Research labs worldwide shut down or at a minimum operated on vastly altered schedules. At some universities and research centers, only lab work directly related to COVID-19 was allowed to continue.

“We had to redirect a lot of the scientific energy towards this pressing global pandemic,” while at the same time keeping safe those who remained in person, Collins says. That was true at the NIH’s Maryland campus, where most labs, including Collins’s, shut down. “And that doesn’t turn out so well if you’re somebody who needs a lab bench, so we did lose momentum for things that weren’t directly related to COVID,” he says.

When labs did open, it was often in small groups with distance required between lab members. Normally bustling benches were limited to one or two people. And lab mates couldn’t run into each other in the hallway or share their latest successes and failures as they happened.

That has removed a lot of the spontaneity that is a regular part of making discoveries, Heffern says.

But limited time in the lab has forced people to think carefully about how they’re using that time. “My students are getting a lot better at planning experiments and analyzing their data,” she says.

Shifts have also made research teams work together more closely—you have to carefully plan to hand off an experiment to a colleague at the end of your day, according to the University of Michigan’s Narayan. “Ultimately, I think those skills are going to serve people really well in their training and launching into different careers,” she says. This will also help move chemistry away from the idea that “you should be chained to your hood 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” she adds.

Stability of schools

Academic institutions worldwide have undoubtedly been changed by the pandemic. Beyond shutting down labs, many moved classes online as the pandemic spread and remained completely or partially remote for the rest of the year. That put many US schools that were no longer getting fees for residence halls or meal plans in a financially precarious position.

If schools can open their campuses in fall 2021, “the ones that had money will probably be OK,” Thorp says. “And the ones that ran out of money? A lot of those are going to have a hard time recovering.”

Schools with endowments or consistent government support should be able to cover losses. But those that rely on tuition to pay salaries and fund their day-to-day operations don’t have that safety net.

Related: Coping with COVID-19 uncertainty—again

Many students dropped out or deferred enrollment, which put tuition-reliant schools in a tough position. The enrollment decline has been especially precipitous among international students, who often pay full tuition but have no way to get to the US during a pandemic. At the same time, universities have had to shut down medical services, facility rentals, sports events, and other revenue streams that keep their campuses functioning.

In addition, Echegoyen says, students are questioning paying the same tuition and fees when classes are fully or partially online. “Will a whole new economic model evolve for universities?” he wonders.

No matter what happens, “there’s going to be a lot of belt tightening” at tuition-driven universities, Echegoyen says. In many cases, administrators and lab technicians were the first to face furloughs and cuts. But prolonged hiring freezes will mean that many graduate students and postdocs won’t be able to find their first academic positions. “A lot of people are going to find themselves without jobs,” Echegoyen says.

Most at risk for job losses and cuts might be universities that rely on their medical schools and associated hospitals for support. The pandemic has caused many to curtail outpatient clinical and elective procedures, the NIH’s Collins says. “No question about it, it is going to take a long time for universities to recover.”

This story was updated on Feb. 1, 2021, to correct the affiliation of Pall Thordarson. He works at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, not the University of Sydney.

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How Science Beat the Virus

And what it lost in the process

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This article was published online on December 14, 2020.

In fall of 2019, exactly zero scientists were studying COVID‑19, because no one knew the disease existed. The coronavirus that causes it, SARS‑CoV‑2, had only recently jumped into humans and had been neither identified nor named. But by the end of March 2020, it had spread to more than 170 countries, sickened more than 750,000 people, and triggered the biggest pivot in the history of modern science. Thousands of researchers dropped whatever intellectual puzzles had previously consumed their curiosity and began working on the pandemic instead. In mere months, science became thoroughly COVID-ized.

As of this writing, the biomedical library PubMed lists more than 74,000 COVID-related scientific papers—more than twice as many as there are about polio, measles, cholera, dengue, or other diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries. Only 9,700 Ebola-related papers have been published since its discovery in 1976; last year, at least one journal received more COVID‑19 papers than that for consideration. By September, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine had received 30,000 submissions—16,000 more than in all of 2019. “All that difference is COVID‑19,” Eric Rubin, NEJM ’s editor in chief, says. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, told me, “The way this has resulted in a shift in scientific priorities has been unprecedented.”

Much like famous initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, epidemics focus the energies of large groups of scientists. In the U.S., the influenza pandemic of 1918, the threat of malaria in the tropical battlegrounds of World War II, and the rise of polio in the postwar years all triggered large pivots. Recent epidemics of Ebola and Zika each prompted a temporary burst of funding and publications . But “nothing in history was even close to the level of pivoting that’s happening right now,” Madhukar Pai of McGill University told me.

That’s partly because there are just more scientists: From 1960 to 2010, the number of biological or medical researchers in the U.S. increased sevenfold , from just 30,000 to more than 220,000. But SARS-CoV-2 has also spread farther and faster than any new virus in a century. For Western scientists, it wasn’t a faraway threat like Ebola. It threatened to inflame their lungs. It shut down their labs. “It hit us at home,” Pai said.

In a survey of 2,500 researchers in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, Kyle Myers from Harvard and his team found that 32 percent had shifted their focus toward the pandemic. Neuroscientists who study the sense of smell started investigating why COVID‑19 patients tend to lose theirs. Physicists who had previously experienced infectious diseases only by contracting them found themselves creating models to inform policy makers. Michael D. L. Johnson at the University of Arizona normally studies copper’s toxic effects on bacteria. But when he learned that SARS‑CoV‑2 persists for less time on copper surfaces than on other materials, he partially pivoted to see how the virus might be vulnerable to the metal. No other disease has been scrutinized so intensely, by so much combined intellect, in so brief a time.

These efforts have already paid off. New diagnostic tests can detect the virus within minutes. Massive open data sets of viral genomes and COVID‑19 cases have produced the most detailed picture yet of a new disease’s evolution. Vaccines are being developed with record-breaking speed. SARS‑CoV‑2 will be one of the most thoroughly characterized of all pathogens, and the secrets it yields will deepen our understanding of other viruses, leaving the world better prepared to face the next pandemic.

But the COVID‑19 pivot has also revealed the all-too-human frailties of the scientific enterprise . Flawed research made the pandemic more confusing, influencing misguided policies. Clinicians wasted millions of dollars on trials that were so sloppy as to be pointless. Overconfident poseurs published misleading work on topics in which they had no expertise. Racial and gender inequalities in the scientific field widened.

Amid a long winter of sickness , it’s hard not to focus on the political failures that led us to a third surge. But when people look back on this period, decades from now, they will also tell stories, both good and bad, about this extraordinary moment for science. At its best, science is a self-correcting march toward greater knowledge for the betterment of humanity. At its worst, it is a self-interested pursuit of greater prestige at the cost of truth and rigor. The pandemic brought both aspects to the fore. Humanity will benefit from the products of the COVID‑19 pivot. Science itself will too, if it learns from the experience.

In February, Jennifer Doudna, one of America’s most prominent scientists, was still focused on CRISPR—the gene-editing tool that she’d co-discovered and that won her a Nobel Prize in October. But when her son’s high school shut down and UC Berkeley, her university, closed its campus, the severity of the impending pandemic became clear. “In three weeks, I went from thinking we’re still okay to thinking that my whole life is going to change,” she told me. On March 13, she and dozens of colleagues at the Innovative Genomics Institute, which she leads, agreed to pause most of their ongoing projects and redirect their skills to addressing COVID‑19. They worked on CRISPR-based diagnostic tests. Because existing tests were in short supply, they converted lab space into a pop-up testing facility to serve the local community. “We need to make our expertise relevant to whatever is happening right now,” she said.

Scientists who’d already been studying other emerging diseases were even quicker off the mark. Lauren Gardner, an engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University who has studied dengue and Zika, knew that new epidemics are accompanied by a dearth of real-time data. So she and one of her students created an online global dashboard to map and tally all publicly reported COVID‑19 cases and deaths. After one night of work, they released it, on January 22. The dashboard has since been accessed daily by governments, public-health agencies, news organizations, and anxious citizens.

Studying deadly viruses is challenging at the best of times, and was especially so this past year. To handle SARS‑CoV‑2, scientists must work in “biosafety level 3” labs, fitted with special airflow systems and other extreme measures; although the actual number is not known, an estimated 200 such facilities exist in the U.S. Researchers often test new drugs and vaccines on monkeys before proceeding to human trials, but the U.S. is facing a monkey shortage after China stopped exporting the animals, possibly because it needed them for research. And other biomedical research is now more difficult because of physical-distancing requirements. “Usually we had people packed in, but with COVID, we do shift work,” Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale immunologist, told me. “People are coming in at ridiculous hours” to protect themselves from the very virus they are trying to study.

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Experts on emerging diseases are scarce: These threats go neglected by the public in the lulls between epidemics. “Just a year ago I had to explain to people why I was studying coronaviruses,” says Lisa Gralinski of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “That’s never going to be a concern again.” Stressed and stretched, she and other emerging-disease researchers were also conscripted into unfamiliar roles. They’re acting as makeshift advisers to businesses, schools, and local governments. They’re barraged by interview requests from journalists. They’re explaining the nuances of the pandemic on Twitter, to huge new follower counts. “It’s often the same person who’s helping the Namibian government to manage malaria outbreaks and is now being pulled into helping Maryland manage COVID‑19,” Gardner told me.

But the newfound global interest in viruses also means “you have a lot more people you can talk through problems with,” Pardis Sabeti, a computational geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, told me. Indeed, COVID‑19 papers are more likely than typical biomedical studies to have authors who had never published together before, according to a team led by Ying Ding, who works at the University of Texas at Austin.

Fast-forming alliances could work at breakneck speed because many researchers had spent the past few decades transforming science from a plodding, cloistered endeavor into something nimbler and more transparent. Traditionally, a scientist submits her paper to a journal, which sends it to a (surprisingly small) group of peers for (several rounds of usually anonymous) comments; if the paper passes this (typically months-long) peer-review gantlet, it is published (often behind an expensive paywall). Languid and opaque, this system is ill-suited to a fast-moving outbreak. But biomedical scientists can now upload preliminary versions of their papers, or “preprints,” to freely accessible websites, allowing others to immediately dissect and build upon their results. This practice had been slowly gaining popularity before 2020, but proved so vital for sharing information about COVID‑19 that it will likely become a mainstay of modern biomedical research. Preprints accelerate science, and the pandemic accelerated the use of preprints. At the start of the year, one repository, medRxiv (pronounced “med archive”), held about 1,000 preprints. By the end of October, it had more than 12,000.

Open data sets and sophisticated new tools to manipulate them have likewise made today’s researchers more flexible. SARS‑CoV‑2’s genome was decoded and shared by Chinese scientists just 10 days after the first cases were reported. By November, more than 197,000 SARS‑CoV‑2 genomes had been sequenced. About 90 years ago, no one had even seen an individual virus; today, scientists have reconstructed the shape of SARS‑CoV‑2 down to the position of individual atoms. Researchers have begun to uncover how SARS‑CoV‑2 compares with other coronaviruses in wild bats, the likely reservoir; how it infiltrates and co-opts our cells; how the immune system overreacts to it, creating the symptoms of COVID‑19. “We’re learning about this virus faster than we’ve ever learned about any virus in history,” Sabeti said.

By March, the odds of quickly eradicating the new coronavirus looked slim. A vaccine became the likeliest endgame, and the race to create one was a resounding success. The process normally takes years, but as I write this, 54 different vaccines are being tested for safety and efficacy, and 12 have entered Phase 3 clinical trials—the final checkpoint. As of this writing, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have announced that, based on preliminary results from these trials, their respective vaccines are roughly 95 percent effective at preventing COVID‑19. * “We went from a virus whose sequence was only known in January, and now in the fall, we’re finishing— finishing —a Phase 3 trial,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, told me. “Holy mackerel.”

Most vaccines comprise dead, weakened, or fragmented pathogens, and must be made from scratch whenever a new threat emerges. But over the past decade, the U.S. and other countries have moved away from this slow “one bug, one drug” approach. Instead, they’ve invested in so-called platform technologies, in which a standard chassis can be easily customized with different payloads that target new viruses. For example, the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines both consist of nanoparticles that contain pieces of SARS‑CoV‑2’s genetic material—its mRNA. When volunteers are injected with these particles, their cells use the mRNA to reconstruct a noninfectious fragment of the virus, allowing their immune system to prepare antibodies that neutralize it. No company has ever brought an mRNA vaccine to market before, but because the basic platform had already been refined, researchers could quickly repurpose it with SARS‑CoV‑2’s mRNA. Moderna got its vaccine into Phase 1 clinical trials on March 16, just 66 days after the new virus’s genome was first uploaded—far faster than any pre-COVID vaccine.

Meanwhile, companies compressed the process of vaccine development by running what would normally be sequential steps in parallel, while still checking for safety and efficacy. The federal government’s Operation Warp Speed, an effort to accelerate vaccine distribution, funded several companies at once—an unusual move. It preordered doses and invested in manufacturing facilities before trials were complete, reducing the risk for pharmaceutical companies looking to participate. Ironically, federal ineptitude at containing SARS‑CoV‑2 helped too. In the U.S., “the fact that the virus is everywhere makes it easier to gauge the performance of a vaccine,” says Natalie Dean of the University of Florida, who studies vaccine trials. “You can’t do a [Phase 3] vaccine trial in South Korea,” because the outbreak there is under control.

Read: How the pandemic will end

Vaccines will not immediately end the pandemic . Millions of doses will have to be manufactured, allocated, and distributed ; large numbers of Americans could refuse the vaccine ; and how long vaccine-induced immunity will last is still unclear. In the rosiest scenario, the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are approved and smoothly rolled out over the next 12 months. By the end of the year, the U.S. achieves herd immunity, after which the virus struggles to find susceptible hosts. It still circulates, but outbreaks are sporadic and short-lived. Schools and businesses reopen. Families hug tightly and celebrate joyously over Thanksgiving and Christmas.

And the next time a mystery pathogen emerges, scientists hope to quickly slot its genetic material into proven platforms, and move the resulting vaccines through the same speedy pipelines that were developed during this pandemic. “I don’t think the world of vaccine development will ever be the same again,” says Nicole Lurie of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

As fast as the vaccine-development process was, it could have been faster. Despite the stakes, some pharmaceutical companies with relevant expertise chose not to enter the race, perhaps dissuaded by intense competition. Instead, from February to May, the sector roughly tripled its efforts to develop drugs to treat COVID‑19, according to Kevin Bryan, an economist at the University of Toronto. The decades-old steroid dexamethasone turned out to reduce death rates among severely ill patients on ventilators by more than 12 percent. Early hints suggest that newer treatments such as the monoclonal-antibody therapy bamlanivimab, which was just approved for emergency use by the FDA, could help newly infected patients who have not yet been hospitalized. But although these wins are significant, they are scarce. Most drugs haven’t been effective. Health-care workers became better at saving hospitalized patients more through improvements in basic medical care than through pharmaceutical panaceas—a predictable outcome, because antiviral drugs tend to offer only modest benefits.

The quest for COVID‑19 treatments was slowed by a torrent of shoddy studies whose results were meaningless at best and misleading at worst. Many of the thousands of clinical trials that were launched were too small to produce statistically solid results. Some lacked a control group—a set of comparable patients who received a placebo, and who provided a baseline against which the effects of a drug could be judged. Other trials needlessly overlapped. At least 227 involved hydroxychloroquine—the antimalarial drug that Donald Trump hyped for months. A few large trials eventually confirmed that hydroxychloroquine does nothing for COVID‑19 patients, but not before hundreds of thousands of people were recruited into pointlessly small studies . More than 100,000 Americans have also received convalescent plasma—another treatment that Trump touted. But because most were not enrolled in rigorous trials, “we still don’t know if it works—and it likely doesn’t,” says Luciana Borio, the former director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council. “What a waste of time and resources.”

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In the heat of a disaster, when emergency rooms are filling and patients are dying, it is hard to set up one careful study, let alone coordinate several across a country. But coordination is not impossible. During World War II , federal agencies unified private companies, universities, the military, and other entities in a carefully orchestrated effort to speed pharmaceutical development from benchtop to battlefield. The results—revolutionary malaria treatments, new ways of mass-producing antibiotics, and at least 10 new or improved vaccines for influenza and other diseases—represented “not a triumph of scientific genius but rather of organizational purpose and efficiency,” Kendall Hoyt of Dartmouth College has written.

Similar triumphs occurred last year—in other countries. In March, taking advantage of the United Kingdom’s nationalized health system, British researchers launched a nationwide study called Recovery, which has since enrolled more than 17,600 COVID‑19 patients across 176 institutions. Recovery offered conclusive answers about dexamethasone and hydroxychloroquine and is set to weigh in on several other treatments. No other study has done more to shape the treatment of COVID‑19. The U.S. is now catching up. In April, the NIH launched a partnership called ACTIV , in which academic and industry scientists prioritized the most promising drugs and coordinated trial plans across the country. Since August, several such trials have started. This model was late, but is likely to outlast the pandemic itself, allowing future researchers to rapidly sort medical wheat from pharmaceutical chaff. “I can’t imagine we’ll go back to doing clinical research in the future the way we did in the past,” the NIH’s Francis Collins said.

Even after the COVID‑19 pandemic, the fruits of the pivot will leave us better equipped for our long and intensifying war against harmful viruses. The last time a virus caused this much devastation—the flu pandemic of 1918—scientists were only just learning about viruses, and spent time looking for a bacterial culprit. This one is different. With so many scientists observing intently as a virus wreaks its horrible work upon millions of bodies, the world is learning lessons that could change the way we think about these pathogens forevermore.

Consider the long-term consequences of viral infections. Years after the original SARS virus hit Hong Kong in 2003, about a quarter of survivors still had myalgic encephalomyelitis—a chronic illness whose symptoms, such as extreme fatigue and brain fogs, can worsen dramatically after mild exertion. ME cases are thought to be linked to viral infections, and clusters sometimes follow big outbreaks. So when SARS‑CoV‑2 started spreading, people with ME were unsurprised to hear that tens of thousands of COVID‑19 “long-haulers” were experiencing incapacitating symptoms that rolled on for months . “Everyone in my community has been thinking about this since the start of the pandemic,” says Jennifer Brea, the executive director of the advocacy group #MEAction.

ME and sister illnesses such as dysautonomia, fibromyalgia, and mast cell activation syndrome have long been neglected, their symptoms dismissed as imaginary or psychiatric. Research is poorly funded, so few scientists study them. Little is known about how to prevent and treat them. This negligence has left COVID‑19 long-haulers with few answers or options, and they initially endured the same dismissal as the larger ME community. But their sheer numbers have forced a degree of recognition. They started researching, cataloging their own symptoms. They gained audiences with the NIH and the World Health Organization. Patients who are themselves experts in infectious disease or public health published their stories in top journals. “Long COVID” is being taken seriously, and Brea hopes it might drag all post-infection illnesses into the spotlight. ME never experienced a pivot. COVID‑19 might inadvertently create one.

Anthony Fauci hopes so. His career was defined by HIV, and in 2019 he said in a paper he co-wrote that “the collateral advantages of” studying HIV “have been profound.” Research into HIV/AIDS revolutionized our understanding of the immune system and how diseases subvert it. It produced techniques for developing antiviral drugs that led to treatments for hepatitis C. Inactivated versions of HIV have been used to treat cancers and genetic disorders. From one disease came a cascade of benefits. COVID‑19 will be no different. Fauci had personally seen cases of prolonged symptoms after other viral infections, but “I didn’t really have a good scientific handle on it,” he told me. Such cases are hard to study, because it’s usually impossible to identify the instigating pathogen. But COVID‑19 has created “the most unusual situation imaginable,” Fauci said—a massive cohort of people with long-haul symptoms that are almost certainly caused by one known virus. “It’s an opportunity we cannot lose,” he said.

Read: The core lesson of the COVID-19 heart debate

COVID‑19 has developed a terrifying mystique because it seems to behave in unusual ways. It causes mild symptoms in some but critical illness in others. It is a respiratory virus and yet seems to attack the heart, brain, kidneys, and other organs. It has reinfected a small number of people who had recently recovered. But many other viruses share similar abilities; they just don’t infect millions of people in a matter of months or grab the attention of the entire scientific community. Thanks to COVID‑19, more researchers are looking for these rarer sides of viral infections, and spotting them.

At least 20 known viruses, including influenza and measles, can trigger myocarditis—inflammation of the heart. Some of these cases resolve on their own, but others cause persistent scarring, and still others rapidly progress into lethal problems. No one knows what proportion of people with viral myocarditis experience the most mild fate, because doctors typically notice only those who seek medical attention. But now researchers are also intently scrutinizing the hearts of people with mild or asymptomatic COVID‑19 infections, including college athletes, given concerns about sudden cardiac arrest during strenuous workouts. The lessons from these efforts could ultimately avert deaths from other infections.

Respiratory viruses, though extremely common, are often neglected. Respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, bocaviruses, a quartet of other human coronaviruses—they mostly cause mild coldlike illnesses, but those can be severe. How often? Why? It’s hard to say, because, influenza aside, such viruses attract little funding or interest. “There’s a perception that they’re just colds and there’s nothing much to learn,” says Emily Martin of the University of Michigan, who has long struggled to get funding to study them. Such reasoning is shortsighted folly. Respiratory viruses are the pathogens most likely to cause pandemics, and those outbreaks could potentially be far worse than COVID‑19’s.

Read: We need to talk about ventilation

Their movements through the air have been poorly studied, too. “There’s this very entrenched idea,” says Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, that viruses mostly spread through droplets (short-range globs of snot and spit) rather than aerosols (smaller, dustlike flecks that travel farther). That idea dates back to the 1930s, when scientists were upending outdated notions that disease was caused by “bad air,” or miasma. But the evidence that SARS‑CoV‑2 can spread through aerosols “is now overwhelming,” says Marr, one of the few scientists who, before the pandemic, studied how viruses spread through air. “I’ve seen more acceptance in the last six months than over the 12 years I’ve been working on this.”

Another pandemic is inevitable, but it will find a very different community of scientists than COVID‑19 did. They will immediately work to determine whether the pathogen—most likely another respiratory virus—moves through aerosols, and whether it spreads from infected people before causing symptoms. They might call for masks and better ventilation from the earliest moments, not after months of debate. They will anticipate the possibility of an imminent wave of long-haul symptoms, and hopefully discover ways of preventing them. They might set up research groups to prioritize the most promising drugs and coordinate large clinical trials. They might take vaccine platforms that worked best against COVID‑19, slot in the genetic material of the new pathogen, and have a vaccine ready within months.

For all its benefits, the single-minded focus on COVID‑19 will also leave a slew of negative legacies. Science is mostly a zero-sum game, and when one topic monopolizes attention and money, others lose out. Last year, between physical-distancing restrictions, redirected funds, and distracted scientists, many lines of research slowed to a crawl. Long-term studies that monitored bird migrations or the changing climate will forever have holes in their data because field research had to be canceled. Conservationists who worked to protect monkeys and apes kept their distance for fear of passing COVID‑19 to already endangered species. Roughly 80 percent of non-COVID‑19 clinical trials in the U.S.—likely worth billions of dollars—were interrupted or stopped because hospitals were overwhelmed and volunteers were stuck at home. Even research on other infectious diseases was back-burnered. “All the non-COVID work that I was working on before the pandemic started is now piling up and gathering dust,” says Angela Rasmussen of Georgetown University, who normally studies Ebola and MERS. “Those are still problems.”

The COVID‑19 pandemic is a singular disaster, and it is reasonable for society—and scientists—to prioritize it. But the pivot was driven by opportunism as much as altruism. Governments, philanthropies, and universities channeled huge sums toward COVID‑19 research. The NIH alone received nearly $3.6 billion from Congress. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation apportioned $350 million for COVID‑19 work. “Whenever there’s a big pot of money, there’s a feeding frenzy,” Madhukar Pai told me. He works on tuberculosis, which causes 1.5 million deaths a year—comparable to COVID‑19’s toll in 2020. Yet tuberculosis research has been mostly paused. None of Pai’s colleagues pivoted when Ebola or Zika struck, but “half of us have now swung to working on COVID‑19,” he said. “It’s a black hole, sucking us all in.”

While the most qualified experts became quickly immersed in the pandemic response, others were stuck at home looking for ways to contribute. Using the same systems that made science faster, they could download data from free databases, run quick analyses with intuitive tools, publish their work on preprint servers, and publicize it on Twitter. Often, they made things worse by swerving out of their scholarly lanes and plowing into unfamiliar territory. Nathan Ballantyne, a philosopher at Fordham University, calls this “ epistemic trespassing .” It can be a good thing: Continental drift was championed by Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist; microbes were first documented by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a draper. But more often than not, epistemic trespassing just creates a mess, especially when inexperience couples with overconfidence.

On March 28, a preprint noted that countries that universally use a tuberculosis vaccine called BCG had lower COVID‑19 mortality rates. But such cross-country comparisons are infamously treacherous. For example, countries with higher cigarette-usage rates have longer life expectancies, not because smoking prolongs life but because it is more popular in wealthier nations. This tendency to draw faulty conclusions about individual health using data about large geographical regions is called the ecological fallacy. Epidemiologists know to avoid it. The BCG-preprint authors, who were from an osteopathic college in New York, didn’t seem to . But their paper was covered by more than 70 news outlets, and dozens of inexperienced teams offered similarly specious analyses. “People who don’t know how to spell tuberculosis have told me they can solve the link between BCG and COVID‑19,” Pai said. “Someone told me they can do it in 48 hours with a hackathon.”

Other epistemic trespassers spent their time reinventing the wheel. One new study, published in NEJM , used lasers to show that when people speak, they release aerosols. But as the authors themselves note, the same result—sans lasers—was published in 1946, Marr says. I asked her whether any papers from the 2020 batch had taught her something new. After an uncomfortably long pause, she mentioned just one.

In some cases, bad papers helped shape the public narrative of the pandemic. On March 16, two biogeographers published a preprint arguing that COVID‑19 will “marginally affect the tropics” because it fares poorly in warm, humid conditions. Disease experts quickly noted that techniques like the ones the duo used are meant for modeling the geographic ranges of animal and plant species or vector-borne pathogens, and are ill-suited to simulating the spread of viruses like SARS-CoV-2. But their claim was picked up by more than 50 news outlets and echoed by the United Nations World Food Program. COVID‑19 has since run rampant in many tropical countries, including Brazil, Indonesia, and Colombia—and the preprint’s authors have qualified their conclusions in later versions of the paper. “It takes a certain type of person to think that weeks of reading papers gives them more perspective than someone with a Ph.D. on that subject, and that type of person has gotten a lot of airtime in this pandemic,” says Colin Carlson of Georgetown.

The incentives to trespass are substantial. Academia is a pyramid scheme: Each biomedical professor trains an average of six doctoral students across her career, but only 16 percent of the students get tenure-track positions . Competition is ferocious, and success hinges on getting published—a feat made easier by dramatic results. These factors pull researchers toward speed, short-termism, and hype at the expense of rigor—and the pandemic intensified that pull. With an anxious world crying out for information, any new paper could immediately draw international press coverage—and hundreds of citations.

The tsunami of rushed but dubious work made life harder for actual experts, who struggled to sift the signal from the noise. They also felt obliged to debunk spurious research in long Twitter threads and relentless media interviews—acts of public service that are rarely rewarded in academia. And they were overwhelmed by requests to peer-review new papers. Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease researcher at Scripps Research, told me that journals used to send him two or three such requests a month. Now “I’m getting three or five a day,” he said in September.

The pandemic’s opportunities also fell inequitably upon the scientific community. In March, Congress awarded $75 million to the National Science Foundation to fast-track studies that could quickly contribute to the pandemic response. “That money just went ,” says Cassidy Sugimoto of Indiana University, who was on rotation at the agency at the time. “It was a first-come, first-served environment. It advantaged people who were aware of the system and could act upon it quickly.” But not all scientists could pivot to COVID‑19, or pivot with equal speed.

Among scientists, as in other fields, women do more child care, domestic work, and teaching than men, and are more often asked for emotional support by their students. These burdens increased as the pandemic took hold, leaving women scientists “less able to commit their time to learning about a new area of study, and less able to start a whole new research project,” says Molly M. King, a sociologist at Santa Clara University. Women’s research hours fell by nine percentage points more than did men’s because of the pressures of COVID‑19. And when COVID‑19 created new opportunities, men grabbed them more quickly. In the spring, the proportion of papers with women as first authors fell almost 44 percent in the preprint repository medRxiv, relative to 2019. And published COVID‑19 papers had 19 percent fewer women as first authors compared with papers from the same journals in the previous year. Men led more than 80 percent of national COVID‑19 task forces in 87 countries . Male scientists were quoted four times as frequently as female scientists in American news stories about the pandemic.

American scientists of color also found it harder to pivot than their white peers, because of unique challenges that sapped their time and energy. Black, Latino, and Indigenous scientists were most likely to have lost loved ones, adding mourning to their list of duties. Many grieved, too, after the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and others. They often faced questions from relatives who were mistrustful of the medical system, or were experiencing discriminatory care. They were suddenly tasked with helping their predominantly white institutions fight racism. Neil Lewis Jr. at Cornell, who studies racial health disparities, told me that many psychologists had long deemed his work irrelevant. “All of a sudden my inbox is drowning,” he said, while some of his own relatives have become ill and one has died.

Science suffers from the so-called Matthew effect, whereby small successes snowball into ever greater advantages, irrespective of merit. Similarly, early hindrances linger. Young researchers who could not pivot because they were too busy caring or grieving for others might suffer lasting consequences from an unproductive year. COVID‑19 “has really put the clock back in terms of closing the gap for women and underrepresented minorities,” Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki says. “Once we’re over the pandemic, we’ll need to fix it all again.”

COVID-19 has already changed science immensely, but if scientists are savvy, the most profound pivot is still to come—a grand reimagining of what medicine should be. In 1848, the Prussian government sent a young physician named Rudolf Virchow to investigate a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia. Virchow didn’t know what caused the devastating disease, but he realized its spread was possible because of malnutrition, hazardous working conditions, crowded housing, poor sanitation, and the inattention of civil servants and aristocrats—problems that require social and political reforms. “Medicine is a social science,” Virchow said, “and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale.”

This viewpoint fell by the wayside after germ theory became mainstream in the late 19th century. When scientists discovered the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, plague, cholera, dysentery, and syphilis, most fixated on these newly identified nemeses. Societal factors were seen as overly political distractions for researchers who sought to “be as ‘objective’ as possible,” says Elaine Hernandez, a medical sociologist at Indiana University. In the U.S., medicine fractured. New departments of sociology and cultural anthropology kept their eye on the societal side of health, while the nation’s first schools of public health focused instead on fights between germs and individuals. This rift widened as improvements in hygiene, living standards, nutrition, and sanitation lengthened life spans: The more social conditions improved, the more readily they could be ignored.

The ideological pivot away from social medicine began to reverse in the second half of the 20th century. The women’s-rights and civil-rights movements, the rise of environmentalism, and anti-war protests created a generation of scholars who questioned “the legitimacy, ideology, and practice of any science … that disregards social and economic inequality,” wrote Nancy Krieger of Harvard . Beginning in the 1980s, this new wave of social epidemiologists once again studied how poverty, privilege, and living conditions affect a person’s health—to a degree even Virchow hadn’t imagined. But as COVID‑19 has shown, the reintegration is not yet complete.

Politicians initially described COVID‑19 as a “great equalizer,” but when states began releasing demographic data, it was immediately clear that the disease was disproportionately infecting and killing people of color . These disparities aren’t biological. They stem from decades of discrimination and segregation that left minority communities in poorer neighborhoods with low-paying jobs, more health problems, and less access to health care—the same kind of problems that Virchow identified more than 170 years ago.

From the September 2020 issue: How the pandemic defeated America

Simple acts like wearing a mask and staying at home, which rely on people tolerating discomfort for the collective good, became society’s main defenses against the virus in the many months without effective drugs or vaccines. These are known as nonpharmaceutical interventions—a name that betrays medicine’s biological bias. For most of 2020, these were the only interventions on offer, but they were nonetheless defined in opposition to the more highly prized drugs and vaccines.

In March, when the U.S. started shutting down, one of the biggest questions on the mind of Whitney Robinson of UNC at Chapel Hill was: Are our kids going to be out of school for two years? While biomedical scientists tend to focus on sickness and recovery, social epidemiologists like her “think about critical periods that can affect the trajectory of your life,” she told me. Disrupting a child’s schooling at the wrong time can affect their entire career, so scientists should have prioritized research to figure out whether and how schools could reopen safely. But most studies on the spread of COVID‑19 in schools were neither large in scope nor well-designed enough to be conclusive. No federal agency funded a large, nationwide study, even though the federal government had months to do so. The NIH received billions for COVID‑19 research , but the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development—one of its 27 constituent institutes and centers—got nothing.

The horrors that Rudolf Virchow saw in Upper Silesia radicalized him, pushing the future “father of modern pathology” to advocate for social reforms. The current pandemic has affected scientists in the same way. Calm researchers became incensed as potentially game-changing innovations like cheap diagnostic tests were squandered by a negligent administration and a muzzled Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Austere publications like NEJM and Nature published explicitly political editorials castigating the Trump administration for its failures and encouraging voters to hold the president accountable. COVID‑19 could be the catalyst that fully reunifies the social and biological sides of medicine, bridging disciplines that have been separated for too long.

“To study COVID‑19 is not only to study the disease itself as a biological entity,” says Alondra Nelson, the president of the Social Science Research Council. “What looks like a single problem is actually all things, all at once. So what we’re actually studying is literally everything in society, at every scale, from supply chains to individual relationships.”

The scientific community spent the pre-pandemic years designing faster ways of doing experiments, sharing data, and developing vaccines, allowing it to mobilize quickly when COVID‑19 emerged. Its goal now should be to address its many lingering weaknesses. Warped incentives, wasteful practices, overconfidence, inequality, a biomedical bias—COVID‑19 has exposed them all. And in doing so, it offers the world of science a chance to practice one of its most important qualities: self-correction.

* The print version of this article stated that the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were reported to be 95 percent effective at preventing COVID-19 infections. In fact, the vaccines prevent disease, not infection.

This article appears in the January/February 2021 print edition with the headline “The COVID-19 Manhattan Project.”

COVID-19 and Viruses

SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), the virus that causes COVID-19, is one of a number of viruses to have triggered global outbreaks in recent decades. As scientific understanding of viruses improves, researchers across disciplines continue to develop new strategies for preventing, treating, and responding to emerging viral threats. Find answers to your questions on viruses and COVID-19.

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The practice of maintaining distance from or avoiding physical contact with others in an attempt to prevent the spread of disease.

A protein that projects out from the surface of some viruses and is necessary for viral entry into a host cell.

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• Published: 17 June 2021

COVID-19 and the academy: opinions and experiences of university-based scientists in the U.S.

• Timothy P. Johnson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9745-9683 1 ,
• Mary K. Feeney 2 ,
• Heyjie Jung 2 ,
• Ashlee Frandell 2 ,
• Mattia Caldarulo 2 ,
• Lesley Michalegko 2 ,
• Shaika Islam 2 &
• Eric W. Welch 2  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  8 , Article number:  146 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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A Correction to this article was published on 15 November 2021

This article has been updated

Much of the available evidence regarding COVID-19 effects on the scientific community in the U.S. is anecdotal and non-representative. We report findings from a based survey of university-based biologists, biochemists, and civil and environmental engineers regarding negative and positive COVID-19 impacts, respondent contributions to addressing the pandemic, and their opinions regarding COVID-19 research policies. The most common negative impact was university closures, cited by 93% of all scientists. Significant subgroup differences emerged, with higher proportions of women, assistant professors, and scientists at institutions located in COVID-19 “hotspot” counties reporting difficulties concentrating on research. Assistant professors additionally reported facing more unanticipated childcare responsibilities. Approximately half of the sample also reported one or more positive COVID-19 impacts, suggesting the importance of developing a better understanding of the complete range of impacts across all fields of science. Regarding COVID-19 relevant public policy, findings suggest divergence of opinion concerning surveillance technologies and the need to alter federal approval processes for new tests and vaccines.

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Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to dramatically impact public health and economies around the world, especially in the United States, which has disproportionately suffered from it. As of March 1, 2021, more than half a million Americans had perished due to COVID-19 (Hall, 2021 ). The pandemic will likely have far-reaching long-term social, economic and political consequences. The immediate effects on universities and scientific enterprises continue to be reported in the popular media and professional literature. Available evidence suggests that investigator access to on-campus university facilities and resources remains limited (Omary et al., 2020 ; Servick et al., 2020 ), the time scientists spend on research has declined sharply (Myers et al., 2020 ), international collaborations have been reduced (Fry et al., 2020 ), available resources are being diverted away from other research priorities (Kent et al., 2020 ; Saini et al., 2020 ), and peer review and other scientific standards are in danger of being compromised as scientists have rushed to confront the problem (London and Kimmelman, 2020 ; Schwab and Held, 2020 ). There is also concern that long-term COVID-19 impacts on scientific research may disproportionately fall on women (Collins et al., 2020 ; Cui et al., 2020 ; Korbel and Stegle, 2020 ; Minello, 2020 ; Squazzoni et al., 2020 ), persons of color (Gould and Wilson, 2020 ; Staniscuaski et al., 2021 ; Weissman, 2020 ), early-career investigators (Gonzales and Griffin, 2020 ; Kent et al., 2020 ; Termini and Traver, 2020 ; Yan, 2020 ), those with childcare responsibilities (Krukowski et al., 2021 ; Langin, 2020 ; Myers et al., 2020 ; Watchorn and Heckendorf, 2020 ), and graduate students (Chirikov et al., 2020 ; Johnson et al., 2020 ; Toronto Science Policy Network, 2020 ). Much of this information is anecdotal or comes from surveys conducted using non-probability sampling methods or unclear sample frames.

The pandemic has also generated new monitoring, diagnostic, and vaccine research aimed at controlling the spread and minimizing the severity of the disease. While advances in innovations and vaccine trials raise hopes, they have also exposed concerns that surveillance technologies could jeopardize privacy rights (Halpern, 2020 ; Schwartz, 2020 ) and expedited governmental review of new vaccines could jeopardize public health (Thorp, 2020 ). Although these topics have been discussed widely in the media, we know little about how the scientific community views these policy trade-offs.

We report findings from a probability-based sample survey of 362 U.S. university-based biologists, biochemists, and civil and environmental engineers concerning the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on their scientific productivity and investigate differences in impacts by gender, rank, and COVID-19 “hotspot” status.

Survey design

A national survey of scientists and engineers on the impacts of COVID-19 on academic research was conducted by the Center for Science, Technology and Environmental Policy Studies at Arizona State University. The survey instrument was developed by the author team in March 2020. A total of 67 questions were included in the final questionnaire, which respondents completed in an average of 21.1 min (SD = 2.4). The questionnaire included sections asking about impacts on scientist research (39 items), participation in COVID-19 research (5 items), opinions regarding COVID-19 research (10 items) and impacts (8 items), and personal exposure to COVID-19 (5 items). The final questionnaire items, approved by Institutional Review Boards at Arizona State University and at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are listed in the  Supplemental materials .

Sample design

A one-stage cluster sample was designed with the following protocol. We identified all R1 Carnegie classified research-intensive institutions (131 total) using the most recent Carnegie listings. We then stratified the institutions by eight Carnegie region classifications. Because the eight regions vary in size, we randomly selected 20 universities representing a proportionate distribution from each region, ensuring that selected universities within each represented multiple states. For each selected university, we developed a list of all non-tenure track, tenured, and tenure-track faculty in biology, civil and environmental engineering, and biochemistry and genomics departments. These faculty served as the sample for the survey.

Survey administration

The online survey was administered in May 2020, in English using Sawtooth Software ® . A total of 1968 individuals were invited to participate in the survey via email invitations with a series of personalized follow-up email reminders. Electronic prenotification messages were sent in late April prior to the survey launch. A survey invitation with a unique ID, passwords, and hyperlinks to the questionnaire was sent on May 7, followed by three reminder messages. The final completion was obtained on May 28, resulting in 362 complete responses, with an AAPOR response rate (RR4) of 20.9% (American Association for Public Opinion Research, 2016 ). The completed sample was weighted by gender and academic field to represent the population as closely as possible. A conservative measure of sampling error for questions answered by the full sample is ±5 percentage points.

Geographic hotspots

Using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Oster et al., 2020 ), we identified and coded universities in the sample as to whether or not the county in which they were located was classified as a COVID-19 “hotspot” between March 8 and May 31, 2020—the dates our survey was fielded. CDC defined a “hotspot” as a county that meets criteria relating to relative temporal increases in the numbers of cases during the time period examined. More than half of all respondents (56.6%) were employed at the 10 universities in our sample that were identified as being located in hotspot counties.

Descriptive statistics are employed to present findings. All results are weighted. Supplementary Tables  S1 – S7 provide standard errors for all full sample survey estimates reported. Crosstabulations and X 2 tests are used to compare survey responses by gender, academic rank and hotspot status. To adjust for multiple comparisons, we only report test findings for p  < 0.001.

Negative impacts of COVID-19 on scientists

In response to COVID-19 in March 2020, universities were some of the first organizations to shut down in the U.S.—sending faculty, employees, and students home to work remotely. We asked our sample about the major and minor negative and positive impacts of COVID-19 work from home orders. Figure  1 shows the proportion of respondents indicating negative impacts (additional details provided in Supplementary Table  S1 ). Looking first at major negative impacts, the most common was lab work disruptions (71%) followed by disruptions due to slow down or university closure (66%), disruptions in student employment (45%), and collaboration disruptions (40%). Figure  1 also indicates the proportions of scientists reporting minor negative impacts. The most commonly reported minor negative impacts were publishing and other dissemination disruptions (43%), collaboration (39%), grant disruptions (35%), and those related to administrative or staff employment (34%). Overall, the most common impact, major or minor, was slow down or university closure, reported by 93% of the sample.

This chart summarizes the weighted proportions of scientists (on the x -axis; ranging from 0% and 100%) who identified various major (dark blue) and minor (green) impacts of social distancing and other COVID-19-related policies (listed on the y -axis) on their research activities. (Exact question wording: “Have social distancing and other COVID-19-related policies had a negative impact on your research in any of the following ways?”).

More than one-quarter of all scientists (29%) reported they had one or more research grants facing financial problems that were directly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Of those reporting financial problems, two-thirds (67%) were delaying the start of data collection, 50% had applied for timeline extensions, 11% had applied for supplemental funding, 35% ended data collection early, 14% reported experiencing the destruction of lab specimens and/or animals, and 6% had laid-off research staff (results shown in Supplementary Table  S5 ).

Comparing negative impacts of COVID-19 by gender

In normal circumstances, female scientists face more family care responsibilities than men. Women report doing more household chores than male partners (O’Laughlin and Bischoff, 2005 ), and working mothers report more childcare responsibilities (Fox et al., 2011 ). These differences in workload at home, inevitably shape outcomes at work. The COVID-19 pandemic has further blurred the boundary between work and home and increased domestic caregiving responsibilities at the expense of work hours (Collins, 2020 ). Working from home is especially challenging for households with small children, elderly parents, and small working spaces. Many academic scientists now face increased family care responsibilities. We asked respondents if COVID-19-related stay-at-home policies were causing negative impacts related to concentration, anxiety, illness, and child and eldercare responsibilities.

Figure  2 and Supplementary Table  S2 show major negative COVID-19 impacts on home-life situations, by gender. Men and women report the same rank order of major negative outcomes, with the inability to concentrate on research being most common. Yet, a significantly higher proportion of women report difficulties in concentrating on research ( χ 2  = 12.8, df = 1, p  < 0.001). Nearly 50% of women indicated that COVID-19 stay-at-home orders extensively disturbed their research time, while less than one-third of men reported the same.

This chart summarizes the weighted proportions of female (light blue) and male (dark blue) scientists (on the x -axis; ranging from 0% to 50%) who identified negative impacts of social distancing and other COVID-19 policies (listed on the y -axis) on their research activities as a consequence of their home-life situations. (Exact question wording: “Have social distancing and other COVID-19-related policies had a negative impact on your research vis-à-vis any of the following home-life situations?”).

Comparing negative impacts of COVID-19 by rank

Figure  3 and Supplementary Table  S2 show major negative COVID-19 impacts on home-life, by rank. Overall, faculty report similar rank order of major negative outcomes. The most common major negative impact on research was the inability to find uninterrupted time to concentrate on their research followed by unexpected childcare responsibilities and anxiety about exposure to COVID-19. Compared to all others, a significantly greater proportion of assistant professors indicated encountering childcare responsibilities ( χ 2  = 23.62, df = 1, p  < 0.001) and difficulties focusing on their research ( χ 2  = 13.9, df = 1, p  < 0.001) as major negative impacts.

This chart summarizes the weighted proportions of scientists (on the x -axis; ranging from 0% to 50%) by faculty rank status as assistant professor (dark blue), associate professor (light blue), full professor (green), or non-tenure track (brown) who identified negative impacts of social distancing and other COVID-19 policies (listed on the y -axis) on their research activities as a consequence of their home-life situations. (Exact question wording: “Have social distancing and other COVID-19-related policies had a negative impact on your research vis-à-vis any of the following home-life situations?”).

Comparing negative impacts of COVID-19 by hotspot status

Scientists at universities located in COVID-19 hotspot counties generally did not report experiencing disproportionate COVID-19 impacts. They were somewhat more likely to report major difficulties concentrating on research activities (22%), compared to those not situated in hotspot locations (12%), but this difference ( χ 2  = 4.1, df = 1, p  < 0.05) was not statistically significant at our adjusted alpha level of p  < 0.001.

Positive impacts of COVID-19 on scientists

Scientists were asked if they had experienced any positive impacts from COVID-19-related policies. Figure  4 and Supplementary Table  S3 present both the major and minor positive impacts examined. In general, minor impacts were more common than major ones. The most common impact (major or minor) was the opportunity to explore new research topics, indicated by more than a third of the sample (37%). The development of new collaborations (22%), the identification of new grant funding opportunities (21%), and new data sources (19%) were each reported by approximately one in five scientists. There were no significant differences in positive impacts by gender, rank or geographic hotspot status were detected.

The chart summarizes the percent of responding scientists (on the x -axis; ranging from 0% to 60%) who report a major positive impact (blue) and minor positive impact (green) social distancing policies had on five aspects of respondent research. (Exact question wording: “Have social distancing policies had a positive impact on your research in any of the following ways?”).

Overall impacts of COVID-19 on scientists

Virtually all scientists (98%) reported some negative COVID-19 impacts and most reported at least one major negative impact (93%). As Fig.  5 and Supplementary Tables  S1 and S3 indicate, about half also reported experiencing either a major or minor positive impact (52%), although a much smaller proportion identified a major positive impact (17%).

The chart reports the percent of responding scientists (on the x -axis; ranging from 0% to 100%) who report a major or major and minor positive (light blue) or major or major and minor negative impact (dark blue) from social distancing policies. (Exact question wording: (1) “Have social distancing policies had a positive impact on your research in any of the following ways?” (2) “Have social distancing and other COVID-19 related policies had a negative impact on your research vis-à-vis any of the following home-life situations?”).

Contributions to the COVID-19 pandemic response

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated opportunities for scientists to provide research expertise and resources to other researchers and to communicate with the public. We asked scientists if they had contributed expertise to help address the pandemic. Overall, 21% reported doing so. Approximately 18% indicated they had contributed to the scientific community in one or more ways, including activities such as providing lab supplies or equipment to others, collaborating on relevant experiments or analyses, or reviewing others’ research findings or reports. In addition, 13% of all scientists made COVID-19 relevant contributions to the general public by responding to media requests or helping disseminate or interpret relevant research findings. Using a conservative test for statistical difference of p  < 0.001, no differences by gender, rank, or COVID-19 hotspot were found. These findings are reported in Supplementary Table  S6 .

Perceptions about benefits and risks of COVID-19 research and technology

This public health crisis has required weighing the risks and benefits associated with the release of new technologies and scientific knowledge. Academic scientists’ opinions on research, tracking and testing policies vary widely. Just under a quarter of respondents (24%) believe the use of surveillance technology including facial recognition, fine-grained location tracking and temperature detection is necessary to mitigate the pandemic. More than half (53%) responded that surveillance technologies are ‘necessary but should be better regulated’ while another 11% reported that ‘use depends on the situation’. These results are reported in Supplementary Table  S7 .

Figure  6 and Supplementary Table  S4 show that a majority of scientists believe that the benefits of expedited availability of new testing technologies during the pandemic exceed the risks. Respondents indicated that the benefits of suspending some of the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) approval processes outweigh the risks for expediting active infection testing diagnostics (63%) and prior infection testing diagnostics (54%). Yet, opinions about suspending some of the FDA approval processes to expedite the availability of a vaccine were more balanced with 43% believing the benefits outweigh the risks and 35% believe the risks outweigh the benefits. This split of opinion is reinforced by responses to a question on the ethics of bypassing some formal approval processes to distribute a vaccine more quickly (see Supplementary Table  S8 ). Nearly the same percentage of respondents believe bypassing is unethical (31%) and ethical (29%), while 40% indicate that it would depend on the situation.

The chart reports the percent of responding scientists (on the x -axis; ranging from 0% to 100%) indicating benefits exceed risks (light blue), risks and benefits about equal (green) and risks exceed benefits (dark blue) in response to three questionnaire items about FDA approval processes for diagnostic tests and vaccine approval. (Exact question wording: “When confronted with a pandemic such as the COVID-19 disease, decisions must be made as to whether or continue following established policies for obtaining FDA approval for newly developed tests and vaccines, or to forego some established procedures in hopes of more quickly releasing products that help confront the crisis. This requires a careful balancing of the risks and benefits of these alternatives. Using the COVID-19 disease as an example, what do you believe is the risk/benefit tradeoff associated with each of the following potential decisions that might need to be made during the time of a national pandemic emergency?”).

Investigation of potential nonresponse bias

Given the survey’s response rate of 20.9%, we conducted a nonresponse bias analysis to determine if any population subgroups might be systematically over-represented or under-represented in these data. Table  1 presents findings from this analysis. Columns 1 and 2 compare survey respondents ( n  = 362) to our full sample ( n  = 1968), suggesting that females and assistant professors were over-represented in the final sample by 5.7 and 5.9 percentage points, respectively. Associate and full professors were under-represented by 3.1 and 2.6 percentage points, respectively, and participation among non-tenure-track faculty and scientists working at institutions located in hotspot areas were approximately equal to their representation in the population (i.e., 0.5 percentage point difference or less). Weighting the survey data (column 3) improved the representation of all subgroups, with the exception of scientists working at hotspot institutions, which became slightly more under-represented. Overall, the weighted sample provides a fairly close representation of the population from which it was selected.

Using a representative sample of academic scientists in U.S. research institutions, we provide evidence of both positive and negative COVID-19 impacts on science, with the negative impacts outpacing the positive. More than 90% of all scientists have experienced at least one major negative impact from COVID-19 and related policies on their research. There are stark differences in negative impacts of COVID-19 by gender and rank. Women are significantly more likely than men to report an inability to concentrate on research activities as a result of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. Previous research indicates academic women in all fields—particularly those with children at home—will likely experience research slowdowns and produce fewer grant submissions and publications during and after the pandemic (Cui et al., 2020 ; Squazzoni et al., 2020 ; Viglione, 2020 ). These differentials may persist beyond the pandemic and throughout their careers.

We also find that assistant professors report significantly higher negative impacts than tenured faculty related to childcare responsibilities. This finding makes sense given assistant professors are typically younger than tenured faculty and in their prime reproductive years, thus more likely to have young children at home (Cardel et al., 2020 ). Additionally, junior women often outnumber senior women in STEM fields, potentially resulting in important negative cohort effects. COVID-19 has exacerbated domestic burdens and childcare responsibilities for early-career female scientists and will have inevitably negatively impact future research productivity, research funding, and tenure and promotion (Cardel et al., 2020 ). It will be increasingly important for universities and science funders to address these gender and rank differences in COVID-19 experiences and their differential impacts on stress, anxiety, and academic outcomes (e.g., teaching, research, and grant getting) (Gonzales and Griffin, 2020 ; Weissman, 2020 ). Cardel et al. ( 2020 ) suggest extending research periods, developing “women-only” and early career funding opportunities, providing childcare resources and support, and monitor service and teaching loads for early career researchers and women among other options. These formal efforts will be necessary to ensure gender equity gains in the academic workforce over the previous decades are not lost because of COVID-19.

Despite the publication of more than 10,000 new papers related to COVID-19 per month (Chen et al., 2021 ), at the time of this study previous research on the positive impacts of COVID-19 and related policies on research activity had not been reported. Indeed, half of the scientists participating in this probability survey reported one or more positive impacts. This is testimony to the resilience and innovativeness of the scientific community and suggests the need for a better understanding of the complete range of short- and long-term negative and positive impacts across all fields of science.

Regarding technology and regulatory policy, our findings reveal important divergence of opinion within the scientific community. Academic scientists do not speak with one mind on the benefits and risks of suspending federal regulatory policies for new COVID-19 technologies and vaccines. Scientists are decidedly split on the ethics of bypassing formal approval processes for expediting a COVID-19 vaccine. This is evidence of both the diversity of opinion within the academic scientific workforce and the complexity of the policy area in which trade-offs are assessed from multiple perspectives.

Although based on probability sampling, we acknowledge this report is limited to biologists, biochemists, and civil & environmental engineers only. Moreover, while we present findings by gender, because the survey did not ask about race and ethnicity, we are unable to assess differences by race or ethnicity. We know that COVID-19 has differently affected communities of color and the negative employment and wage impacts have disproportionately affected women of color both inside and outside of academia (Bohn et al., 2021 ; Gould and Wilson, 2020 ; Staniscuaski et al., 2021 ; Weissman, 2020 ). It is also important to recognize that COVID-19 is an equal opportunity pandemic, impacting research across all academic disciplines, well beyond just the STEM fields, and it is likely to affect career advancement across the entire academic community for years to come. Future research into the effects of COVID-19 policies on the scientific and academic workforce should be expanded to cover other fields of inquiry, race and ethnicity, and the intersection of race and gender.

Data availability

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the Harvard Dataverse repository, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PINEER .

Change history

15 november 2021.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00963-y

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Johnson, T.P., Feeney, M.K., Jung, H. et al. COVID-19 and the academy: opinions and experiences of university-based scientists in the U.S.. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8 , 146 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00823-9

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Portraits of Loss

Alvin powell.

A collection of stories and essays that illustrate the indelible mark left on our community by a pandemic that touched all our lives.

I remember thinking, “I guess I’m having the full COVID-19 experience,” though I knew immediately it wasn’t true. Having the full experience would mean switching places with the frail woman before me. It would mean my eyes were the ones that were closed, my breath silent and shallow.

But I also knew she wouldn’t want it that way. My mother, Alynne Martelle, was protective like that.

It was April 2020, and I was sitting in a Connecticut nursing home across the bed from my sister Kelly San Martin. I wasn’t thinking about how outlandishly I was dressed, but each glance across the bed provided a reminder. We were both wearing thin, disposable yellow gowns and too-big rubber gloves, with surgical masks covering our noses and mouths. We were each hoping the protection would be enough, but at that point in the pandemic’s first spring surge, nothing seemed certain.

Earlier that day — a Friday — I had been working from home and heard from my sister that my mom, 80 and diagnosed with COVID-19, had taken a turn for the worse. I called the nursing home where she’d lived for nearly five years, and the nurse said to come right away. So I told my editors at the Gazette what was going on, got in the car, and headed down the Pike.

I had a couple of hours to think during the drive. As a science writer for the Gazette, I routinely monitor disease outbreaks around the world — SARS, H1N1, seasonal flu — and discuss them with experts at the University. My hope is to lend perspective for readers on news that can seem too distant to be threatening — yet to which they might want to pay attention— or things that seem threateningly close, but in fact are rare enough that the screaming headlines may not be warranted.

“I suspect that a nursing home isn’t part of anyone’s plan for their final years, and it certainly wasn’t for my mother.“ Alvin Powell

There were two times during my coverage of the pandemic that I felt an almost physical sensation — that pit-of-the-stomach feeling of shock or fear. The first was when Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist and head of the Harvard Chan School’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, said early on that, unlike its recent predecessors SARS and MERS, which got people very sick, this virus also caused a lot of mild or asymptomatic cases. As that news sank in, I realized how difficult the future might become: How can you stop something before you know it’s there?

The second time I had that feeling was just a few weeks later. Through February 2020, the number of cases in the U.S. and globally had continued to grow, and it became clear that a major public health emergency was underway. Harvard’s experts, among many others, were offering a way forward, and I was writing regularly about the pandemic, about the new-to-me concept of “social distancing” and the importance of using masks to reduce spread — even as faculty members at our hospitals were also warning of shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE — another term now embedded in our daily language. That was when President Donald Trump used the word “hoax” in discussing the pandemic. When I read that I thought, “This could get a lot worse.”

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By the third week in April, it had. Then, of course, the winter’s much larger surge was still just a vague threat and 100,000 deaths nationally from COVID-19 would soon warrant front-page treatment in The New York Times. Nursing homes — which concentrated society’s frail and elderly — had been hit hard early, as protective measures were being worked out and individual habits — life-saving ones — were still being ingrained.

I suspect that a nursing home isn’t part of anyone’s plan for their final years, and it certainly wasn’t for my mother. She was born in Hartford, poor and proudly Irish. She was artistic, eccentric, and joked later in life that if she hyphenated all her last names, she’d be Alynne Cummings-Powell-Martelle-Martelle-Herzberger-Harripersaud. Though she was tough on her husbands, she was easy on her kids. Despite the roiling of her married life, our home in the Hartford suburbs was mostly stable. That was largely due to the stick-to-it-iveness of my stepfather Sal — the two Martelles in there — and the fact that her four kids never doubted that she loved them.

She traveled even more than she married, preferring out-of-the-way places and bringing home images of the people who lived there. Among her destinations, she spent a summer in Calcutta volunteering at one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages and, on her return, she struck up a correspondence with the future saint.

Alynne Martell (center) surrounded by her children, Laura Lynne Powell (clockwise from left), Kelly San Martin, Alvin Powell, and Joseph Martelle. They are pictured at Hawks Nest Beach in Old Lyme, Conn., where they’ve gone for a week each summer for more than 45 years. Powell and his mother on a family kayak trip on the Black Hall River in Old Lyme.

Mom’s later years were difficult. Her mental decline had her moving from independent to assisted living and then to round-the-clock care. In the last year, her physical health and mobility had declined as well. When my mother spiked a fever in April, my siblings and I assumed it was COVID. It took the doctors some time to work through the possibilities, but they eventually got there, too. They and the nurses reminded us that it was not universally fatal, but nonetheless asked whether she had a living will. She did, and wanted no extraordinary measures taken.

Though many hospitals and nursing homes weren’t allowing visitors, the home where my mother stayed would let us in. Several family members had converged on the parking lot there, and we had a robust discussion of how safe it would be to go inside. My mother’s room was on the first floor, and some family members peered through its sliding glass door. My sister and I decided it was worth the risk to sit with Mom during her final hours, as she would have if indeed our places had been reversed.

On that Friday when Kelly and I entered the lobby, the facility appeared to be taking necessary precautions. In addition to providing PPE, they questioned us about our health and took our temperatures before letting us farther into the building. The main thing I was uneasy about was the use of surgical masks rather than N95 respirators. The N95s, I thought, would provide a level of protection commensurate with sitting in a place where we knew the virus was circulating.

On the second day, two friends teamed up to get us the N95s one had stockpiled during the 2009 H1N1 epidemic. We met in the parking lot for the handover — accomplished with profuse thanks and at a safe distance. The masks eased my mind. The key to weathering the pandemic came not from hiding away, but from a clear-eyed assessment of risks and having a plan to manage them. I had also learned during months of covering the pandemic that even measures inadequate on their own could be powerful when layered over one another. So, though it now seems like overkill, after doffing all the protective gear on the way out, we also changed into clean clothes in the chilly April parking lot, our modesty shielded by open car doors. We stowed the dirty clothes in plastic bags in the trunk and made liberal use of the giant bottle of hand sanitizer Kelly had brought.

“My mom had a metal sculpture of herself made by artist Karen Rossi. Her four kids are hanging off her feet in mobile-style,” writes Alvin Powell.

The result was that my sister and I were able to sit with my mom for several hours over the weekend. She was mostly asleep or unconscious but roused herself, seeming to rise from a place deep inside, to rasp out that she loved us. Then she retreated inward again.

Mom died the following Monday, and I went into home quarantine for two weeks, breaking it once to head back down the Pike to make arrangements with a completely overwhelmed funeral home. She had wanted to be cremated, but the crematorium was also backed up, so they refrigerated her body for several days until they could get to her. Afterward, my brother, Joe Martelle, picked up her remains and brought her home to await her burial.

But we delayed too. We put off her funeral until the family could gather for the bash she wanted as a farewell — she’d picked out the music and assigned tasks to different family members — Joe and I were to build the wooden box for interment. “August,” I initially thought. Then “October.” I was sure about October. My sister in Sacramento, Laura Lynne Powell, had suggested early on we might have to wait for the April anniversary of her death, which at the time seemed ridiculously distant since the pandemic surely would be controlled by then. Now, of course, April’s here and it is still too early for a big gathering.

In the year since my mother died, I’ve been back at work and have continued to learn as much as I can in order to convey our shifting — yet advancing — knowledge to readers. I’ve been repeatedly reminded how far I still am from “the full COVID experience” because the virus seems insatiable and just keeps on taking.

I don’t for a minute think my family is unique in its impacts, but many of those around me have experienced some ugly aspect of it. My son was laid off; my daughter’s 18th birthday, high school graduation, and freshman year in college have been canceled, delayed, or distorted beyond recognition. Two daughters and four grandchildren have been diagnosed with COVID and recovered. In February, four family friends in my Massachusetts town saw the contagion flare through their households, while my own family in Connecticut watched with concern as a loved one became severely ill, later rejoicing at her recovery after treatment with remdesivir.

The pandemic picture seems to have become even muddier lately, devolving into a foot race between vaccines and variants. Through much of March, vaccines seemed sure to win, but warnings from public health officials have become dire of late, warning of too-soon reopenings and the potential for a fourth surge. My stepfather Sal has gotten his second vaccine dose though, so hopefully he, at least, is out of harm’s way. I’m also hearing of friends and family whose first dose appointments are looming. That gives me hope and serves as a reminder that there is one part of “the full COVID experience” I’m looking forward to: its end.

Alvin Powell is the Harvard Gazette’s senior science writer.

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‘breathless’ explores covid-19’s origins and other pandemic science.

The book dissects the controversial question of whether the virus arose in nature or the lab

A new book about the pandemic focuses on the science of SARS-CoV-2 (green in this false-color image of an infected olfactory epithelial cell).

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By Erin Garcia de Jesús

October 4, 2022 at 12:00 pm

Breathless David Quammen Simon & Schuster, $29.99

When COVID-19 burst onto the global stage in 2020, it was deadly and disruptive. In the first weeks of January, researchers identified the cause: A coronavirus was to blame, a relative of the virus that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak. Echoes of what had happened nearly 20 years earlier — thousands were infected and at least 774 people died before the SARS outbreak was brought under control — sent ripples of anxiety throughout the virology world.

Scientists of all backgrounds rushed to understand the new scourge, dubbed SARS-CoV-2. Hospitals around the world were soon overwhelmed, and daily life for billions of people was thrown into disarray. Quarantine, isolation, N95 masks and social distancing entered our collective lexicon. Breathless , by science writer David Quammen, takes readers along on the ensuing two-year scientific roller coaster.

The book is a portrait of the virus — SARS-CoV-2’s early days in China, how decades of science helped researchers craft effective vaccines within a year, the arrival of highly mutated variants. It’s not about the societal upheaval or the public health failures (and successes). While Quammen acknowledges the importance of those aspects of the pandemic, he chooses to focus on the “firehose” of scientific studies — both good and bad — that drove our understanding of COVID-19.

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He dives deep into one of the pandemic’s most controversial questions: Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from? Nature or the lab? Quammen describes the saga in elaborate detail. First there were worries that some of the virus’s features appeared engineered. Those concerns were quickly dispelled when researchers found those features in viruses from wild bats and pangolins. Then there was the thought that workers in a lab studying bat viruses could have become accidentally infected and unknowingly spread the virus to others.

Rather than dismiss that accidental lab leak hypothesis, Quammen takes readers step by step through the genetic and epidemiological data. That includes recent evidence supporting the scenario that the virus emerged — perhaps in two separate jumps — from an unknown animal at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China. Through his conversations with experts in virus ecology and evolution, readers learn the nuances of how virologists do research and the controversies of gain-of-function studies that test what happens when viruses acquire new traits. Quammen’s conclusion: An accidental lab leak is not impossible. “But it seems unlikely.”

To understand the pandemic, Quammen draws on lessons learned from our previous run-ins with coronaviruses, including the SARS outbreak and the 2012 MERS outbreak in the Middle East ( SN: 12/28/13, p. 23 ). Part of his 2012 book Spillover focused on the bat origin of the SARS outbreak ( SN: 10/20/12, p. 30 ). That tome is unnervingly prescient. If the original SARS coronavirus had been most contagious before symptoms began, Quammen wrote in Spillover , officials would have had a much harder time ending the outbreak. “It would be a much darker story,” he wrote. But that’s exactly what happened with SARS-CoV-2. People can pass the virus to others before knowing they are sick, a trait that helped COVID-19 spiral out of control.

As a science journalist who has followed SARS-CoV-2 since its discovery, I found Breathless to be surprisingly cathartic. My memories of the last few years have blurred together. Breathless presents the sweeping scientific story of the pandemic, connecting puzzle pieces that at the time had felt so out of place.

Some readers may feel it’s too soon to scrutinize a pandemic that isn’t even over. But SARS-CoV-2 certainly won’t be the last harmful virus to emerge. Quammen puts the pandemic in the context of the coronavirus scares that came before to highlight how science builds on itself. And one thing is certain: There will be another. “There are many more fearsome viruses where SARS-CoV-2 came from,” he writes, “wherever that was.”

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Science Education in the Light of COVID-19

Michael j. reiss.

UCL Institute of Education, University College London, London, UK

In this position paper, I examine how the history, philosophy and sociology of science (HPS) can contribute to science education in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. I discuss shortcomings in the ways that history is often used in school science, and examine how knowledge of previous pandemics might help in teaching about COVID-19. I look at the potential of issues to do with measurement in the context of COVID-19 (e.g. measurement of mortality figures) to introduce school students to issues about philosophy of science, and I show how COVID-19 has the affordance to broaden and deepen the moral philosophy that students typically meet in biology lessons. COVID-19 also provides opportunities to introduce students to sociological ways of thinking, examining data and questioning human practices. It can also enable students to see how science, economics and politics inter-relate. In the final part of the paper, I suggest that there are strong arguments in favour of an interdisciplinary approach in tackling zoonoses like COVID-19 and that there is much to be said for such interdisciplinarity in school science lessons when teaching about socio-scientific issues and issues intended to raise scientific literacy.

I am primarily a biology educator, and when considering the adequacy of school science education in a time of COVID-19, it is tempting to wring my hands and complain that when I started my school teaching career in the 1980s, we did large amounts of teaching about disease. We taught at secondary level about a whole range of human infectious diseases, with detailed life cycles showing the roles of intermediate hosts and the importance of animal-human transmission; we taught about how infectious diseases could be tackled by prevention (e.g. nets for malaria) as well as treatment and cure. We taught about the role of nutrition and general good health in reducing the likelihood of developing certain diseases and enhancing the body’s ability to respond appropriately if a person did become infected. We taught about the immune system and what happens when it fails to recognise a new pathogen or when it over-reacts. We taught about immunisation and how different approaches to it were needed for different infectious organisms. And I was at the very beginning of my teaching career when HIV/AIDS made an appearance and educators responded quite rapidly with materials and pedagogies to be used in schools (e.g. Harvey and Reiss 1987 ).

But there is not much use in grumbling about historical changes in educational practices, and school science education some 35 years ago did not inhabit a Golden Age. What I want to do here is to respond to Sibel Erduran’s call, as editor of Science & Education , for ‘Position papers about how HPS can contribute to science education in the era of the Covid-19 pandemic’ (Erduran 2020 : p. 234). The paper will also have resonance to the current STEM education special issue of Science & Education. Some of the examples in the paper will illustrate that science is situated not only within history, philosophy and sociology but also it often has implicit links to mathematics, technology and engineering.

My focus is on school science education, recognising that science education takes place in a myriad of other places from those that can respond very rapidly to changing events (the news cycle on the internet, radio and TV) to those that respond more slowly (permanent exhibits in museums). My aim here is not to look at the specifics of how biology education might respond to COVID-19 but rather to examine what history, philosophy and sociology of science might contribute and the implications of this for school science. To structure my argument, I will begin by looking at these three disciplines one by one, though it will soon be evident how much they intertwine, and towards the end of this article, I will argue for the benefits of a more interdisciplinary approach to school science education.

History of Science

In a project that is currently delayed in its pilot stage as a result of COVID-19, Catherine McCrory ( forthcoming ) 1 writes about the place of history in science teaching. She points out that history too often serves in science teaching as ‘decoration’ and cites the historian of science, Hasok Chang, who, in his 2015 Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar lecture, wrote of accounts of history in science textbooks or popular media:

They tend to be ‘human interest’ stories, appearing as mere garnishes to presentations of scientific content – stories of heroic scientists who overcame adversity, tragic scientists hampered by human limitations and circumstances, fortunate scientists who made great discoveries by exploiting chance happenings, strange scientists who engaged in bizarre experiments or devised fantastical theories, and so on. (Chang 2017 : p. 92)

Now, I could erect a defence of garnishes—the surface application of detail so as to delight that quintessentially distinguishes postmodernism from modernism in architecture—but instead I will follow Chang who goes on to ask whether the study of the past of science can help us improve present scientific knowledge—a key question asked in the history, philosophy and sociology of science (HPS) and addressed enthusiastically, as Chang notes, by Harvard’s Project Physics (1962–1972) and successive school curriculum initiatives. In answering his question, Chang argues that knowledge of the history of science can result in a better understanding of the scientific knowledge that is accepted at present. In addition, it can give us a better understanding of the methods that scientists use, to which I will return in the section on the philosophy of science.

Chang’s argument from the history of science is one that has had support within the science education community. Allchin, having undertaken an analysis of Mendel and genetics, Kettlewell and the peppered moth, Fleming and penicillin, Semmelweis and handwashing, and Harvey and the circulation of blood, critiqued ‘popular histories of science that romanticize scientists, inflate the drama of their discoveries, and cast scientists and the process of science in monumental proportion’ (Allchin 2003 : p. 330). He concluded that ‘we do not need more history in science education. Rather, we need different types of history that convey the nature of science more effectively’ (Allchin 2003 : p. 329). In an illustration of the reality that in science education, we often seem to reinvent rather than build on previous findings and arguments, Milne had earlier critiqued ‘heroic science stories’, pointing out that ‘science stories transmit both knowledge and values’ (Milne 1998 : p. 186).

Chang only mentions ‘motivation’ once in his article—and then rather negatively in his final paragraph where he writes ‘I noted that history is often used in order to excite curiosity and give inspiration for science, and that this motivation often encourages distortions and oversimplifications of history’ (Chang 2017 : p. 104). However, as McCrory ( forthcoming ) points out, student motivation matters. When I used to teach secondary students, I peppered (a form of garnish) my lessons with accounts of the lives and work of the scientists behind the science that the students were learning. There were, no doubt, plenty of occasions when even a school history teacher, let alone an academic historian of science, might have cringed on hearing me, but the function of such teaching was not so much for me to teach my students about the history of science, it was to engage them, to motivate them. Only occasionally—the role of Mendel, Darwin and Wallace in the theory of evolution is a notable example—were the historical stories key to the science.

When we focus on COVID-19, it seems clear that history has lessons that can help students both the better to understand the emerging science and to appreciate how science is undertaken. Some of the aims of this teaching will depend on the circumstances under which the teaching takes place. I am writing this in early May 2020 where the widespread presumption in many countries is that we are over the worst of the pandemic and what is needed now is a roadmap to restoring countries to normality, so that people can get back to work and to normal social interactions. Much school teaching, in so far as it is taking place, is occurring on-line or via other modes of distance learning. The reality is that for a biology teacher, this absence of face-to-face contact makes it more difficult to discern and take account of how students are feeling—it may, be, for example, that some students are scared, others grieving, others bored.

The most obvious way that a biology educator might see the role of history of science in a time of COVID-19 is by considering past pandemics. Few students will know that the infectious disease that has killed the most humans over the last two centuries (records before that time are poor in quality) is tuberculosis (TB), caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Paulson 2013 ). To this day, over a million people a year die from it (1.5 million in 2018—the latest year for which good-quality data have been published) (World Health Organization 2020a ). Remarkably, about a quarter of all people around the globe have latent TB—but they do not develop symptoms unless their immune system become severely compromised, for instance through HIV infection or because of malnourishment resulting from something like homelessness.

TB is spread primarily by the inhalation of tiny water droplets with the bacteria that are released when someone who has pulmonary or laryngeal tuberculosis coughs, sneezes, laughs, shouts, etc. This transmission route is also one that COVID-19 has. However, unlike COVID-19, TB is not spread via contact with infected surfaces—touching does not spread TB unless the bacterium is breathed in. A closely related disease, bovine TB, is caused by Mycobacterium bovis and spread from cattle to other mammals, including humans. As with most topics in science, the history of TB is fascinating, and a host of factors—pasteurisation of cow’s milk, improved living standards and general health, the development and increasing use after the Second World War of the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine—has led to it being less of a problem in wealthy countries (Lienhardt et al. 2012 ). The involvement of cattle in the spread of TB has similarities with the importance of animal-human transmission for COVID-19, and there is on-going controversy as to the relevance of badgers in bovine TB (TB in cattle) and about how bovine TB might best be tackled (McCulloch and Reiss 2017 ).

Personally, I would garnish the tuberculosis story with a sprinkling of the terrifying roll call of those who have died from TB: just from the world of literature, there are Anne and Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, John Keats and George Orwell, who survived long enough to be treated in 1948 with the antibiotic streptomycin (discovered in 1943), before dying in 1950.

The pandemic that is most often mentioned in the context of COVID-19 is the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic (see also the 1976–1977 swine flu epidemic in the USA (Neustadt and Fineberg 1978 )). It has been estimated that about 500 million people became infected with the influenza virus (one-third of the then world’s population) and about 50 million people died (a mortality rate of about 10%). Like COVID-19, the disease was another example of a zoonosis (a disease transmitted to humans from non-human animals), being caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian origin (Jordan et al. 2019 ), but, unlike COVID-19, mortality seems to have been highest in people younger than 5 years old, 20–40 years old and 65 years and older (Fig.  1 ).

Camp Funston, at Fort Riley, Kansas, during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Taken from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Camp_Funston%2C_at_Fort_Riley%2C_Kansas%2C_during_the_1918_Spanish_flu_pandemic.jpg

It is not known where the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic originated—though it was probably in the USA, Europe or China (Taubenberger 2006 ). The disease is often referred to as ‘Spanish flu’. The reason for this is not that it originated there but that Spain was one of the few European countries to be neutral in the First World War. Wartime censors in other countries suppressed the news of the influenza, fearing its adverse effect on morale. It is often the case that countries name diseases after other countries, in an attempt to deflect blame from those in power and to stigmatise foreigners:

Syphilis had a variety of names, usually people naming it after an enemy or a country they thought responsible for it. The French called it the ‘Neapolitan disease’, the ‘disease of Naples’ or the ‘Spanish disease’, and later grande verole or grosse verole , the ‘great pox’, the English and Italians called it the ‘French disease’, the ‘Gallic disease’, the ‘ morbus Gallicus ’, or the ‘French pox’, the Germans called it the ‘French evil’, the Scottish called it the ‘ grandgore ’, the Russians called it the ‘Polish disease’, the Polish and the Persians called it the ‘Turkish disease’, the Turkish called it the ‘Christian disease’, the Tahitians called it the ‘British disease’, in India it was called the ‘Portuguese disease’, in Japan it was called the ‘Chinese pox’, and there are some references to it being called the ‘Persian fire’. (Frith 2012 : p. 50)

There are interesting parallels with COVID-19, which Donald Trump, of course, has more than once referred to as ‘the Chinese virus’. Less well known is the story behind the World Health Organization calling the virus ‘the COVID-19 virus’. Viruses are named by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) who have named the causative agent for COVID-19 ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2’ (SARS-CoV-2). However, as the WHO explains:

From a risk communications perspective, using the name SARS can have unintended consequences in terms of creating unnecessary fear for some populations, especially in Asia which was worst affected by the SARS outbreak in 2003. For that reason and others, WHO has begun referring to the virus as “the virus responsible for COVID-19” or “the COVID-19 virus” when communicating with the public. (World Health Organization 2020b )

Finally, there are similarities between current attempts to tackle COVID-19 and historical attempts to tackle the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic (Fig.  2 ). Masks were used, public gatherings banned, schools and businesses closed, good hygiene practices recommended, makeshift hospitals established and desperate (unsuccessful) attempts made to manufacture a vaccine. In the end, it was herd immunity that caused the disease to die out. If it is herd immunity that causes COVID-19 to die out, we will have lost millions of people.

1918 influenza epidemic poster issued by the Board of Health in Alberta, Canada. Taken from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/61/SpanishFluPosterAlberta.png/946px-SpanishFluPosterAlberta.png

Philosophy of Science

There is much overlap between the history of science and the philosophy of science and there is, of course, an enormous literature on the nature of science (NOS). In my own country, England, we have long favoured a simplified version of Popperian science in our accounts for school students as to how scientific knowledge is built up. As I have written previously:

Popper’s ideas easily give rise to a view of science in which scientific knowledge steadily accumulates over time as new theories are proposed and new data collected to discriminate between conflicting theories. Much school experimentation in science is Popperian in essence: we see a rainbow and hypothesise that white light is split up into light of different colours as it is refracted through a transparent medium (water droplets). We test this by attempting to refract white light through a glass prism, we find the same colours of the rainbow are produced and our hypothesis is confirmed. Until some new evidence causes it to be falsified, we accept it. (Reiss 2007 : 63)

This is not the place to give a 101 account of the philosophy of science. More profitable, I think, is to look at how some of the core issues to do with the philosophy of science might usefully be addressed when teaching at school level about COVID-19. We can start with perhaps the most basic thing students are taught to do when beginning to study science—namely to measure carefully, whether they are determining the length of an object, its mass its temperature or whatever. Let us consider the measurement of mortality that results from COVID-19.

We can start by noting that it is very likely that countries under-report deaths from COVID-19. Some of the reasons for this are overtly political but others are to do with more fundamental issues to do with scientific measurement. For a start, attributing cause of death is often a matter of judgement even if we possess perfect knowledge about the circumstances of a person’s death. Consider someone who, under the influence of alcohol, falls and hits their head on a kerb and so dies. Was their death caused by the kerb, the alcohol, the breakup of their relationship that caused them to drink too much, their parents’ poor marriage, which failed to provide a model for a successful relationship or what? One thinks of Aristotle’s material, formal, efficient and final causes and of Hume’s writing about the inherent difficulties of discerning causes.

For school students, they could think about why it is difficult to determine whether people have died as a result of COVID-19. Reasons, in addition to the more general issues raised in the preceding paragraph, include the fact that many people die without a clear-cut diagnosis of COVID-19, in part due in the large majority of countries to a lack of capacity with testing (a consideration which leads to the underestimation of mortality resulting from COVID-19). Students could also be helped to realise that just because I die and am shown by testing to have COVID-19 does not necessarily mean that I died because of COVID-19 infection—as per the above fact that about a quarter of those across the globe who die would test positive for TB but the vast majority of such individuals do not die because of TS infection (a consideration which leads to the overestimation of mortality as a result of COVID-19).

Then, there are what might be termed the indirect consequences of COVID-19 on mortality. To list just some of these, fewer people go to hospital for treatments because they are afraid of becoming infected with COVID-19 there (leading to an increase in mortality rates); greater anxiety and other mental health issues with outcomes that include suicide (leading to an increase in mortality rates); an increase in domestic violence (leading to an increase in mortality rates); lower levels of exercise and increased food consumption (possibly leading to an increase in mortality rates); lower levels of traffic (leading to a decrease in mortality rates); lower levels of air pollution (leading to a decrease in mortality rates); and so on. The point of this litany is not for students to learn it off by heart but to think about the indirect effects that COVID-19 might have on mortality.

In schools, students are all too often given the impression that measurement is a trivial issue—something that with a bit of an effort and some care that they should be able to sort out straightforwardly. Measurement relies on mathematics knowledge, and it can be considered a cross-cutting theme in STEM related problems. At best, they are taught something about random and systematic errors and anomalous results. In reality, careful measurement lies at the heart of science and raises a number of philosophical issues (Tal 2017 ). For a lovely account of what the boiling point of water is, as determined by measurements of it (spoiler alert—water only boils at its official boiling point under very distinctive circumstances), see Chang ( 2008 )—and the issue is often as much to do with what to measure as to how to measure it.

With regard to what to measure, while mortality is what makes headlines, healthcare decisions are rarely made on mortality alone. Students might be introduced to at least two complicating factors. The first is that it may not be that health systems attempt to minimise (or should attempt to minimise) mortality but to maximise what are called QALYs (quality-adjusted life years). The second complicating factor, to which I return below, is to do with the economics of health care rationing.

QALYs are an attempt to deal with the obvious truth that most people do not so much want to live longer per se as to have more years of good health. QALY calculations therefore attempt to combine the additional years of life that are expected to be gained from a successful intervention with a measure of the effects for patients on the quality of their lives. Everyone accepts that actually measuring QALYs is an inexact science but it is generally thought to be better than not trying to. One QALY equals 1 year in perfect health, so that an additional year of life has a maximum QALY of 1 and a minimum of 0 (or even, some maintain, less than 0 if the quality of one’s life is such that one would be better off dead). Measuring the additional years of life from a successful medical intervention can be estimated with some confidence; measuring the quality of life after a medical intervention is much more difficult, and there are various methods used of which the most common is the entirely subjective one of asking people to rate their quality of life on a scale from 0 (I would be as well off if I were dead) to 100 (perfect).

The relevance of QALYs to COVID-19 is that while we are still in the early phase of the pandemic, it is clear that many of those who recover from COVID-19 will have a reduced level of quality of life—for example, because they will require life-long renal dialysis or a kidney transplant. State medical systems have, when resources are finite, to make decisions about how much to treat people and QALYs are used to help facilitate such decisions. If something like QALYs are not used, health systems can end up spending all their resources on keeping a relatively small number of people alive when many others could be treated or enabled never to become ill in the first place (e.g. through public health initiatives) for the same amount of financial investment and medical time (also often a limiting resource).

In the above, I have focused on the measurement of mortality and issues to do with the quality of life, but there are other important issues to do with COVID-19 and measurement. In particular, the value of the basic reproduction number (R 0 ), i.e. the average number of new infections generated by an infectious person in a totally naïve population, and of the subsequent reproduction rate (R), i.e. the average number of new infections generated by an infectious person at any time, are both difficult to determine. Estimates of R 0 for COVID-19 currently vary by a factor of more than two (Liu et al. 2020 ), and there is inevitably a time lag between the human behaviours that affect R and subsequent measurements of it. Students can also be helped to appreciate that R is affected by a very large number of variables to do with both the person who is already infected and those whom they may go on to affect (including, age, gender, population density, presence of underlying health conditions and a number of variables to do with behaviour, such as extent of social interactions and personal hygiene). Students might also be helped to appreciate that TB, while it has a similar value of R to that of COVID-19 (a recent review gave values that range from 0.24 to 4.3 (Ma et al. 2018 )), is far less contagious, in the sense that it is substantially less likely that a person with TB will spread it to someone else per unit of time that they spend in each other’s company. TB, unlike COVID-19, influenza or colds, usually only spreads between family members who live in the same house.

I have concentrated in this section on issues to do with measurement. When measurement is considered in undergraduate physical science courses, the emphasis is on issues to do with quantum theory. As is well known, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that there is a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical constants can be measured (iconically, momentum and position). At the appropriate stage of their education, students can be helped to enquire whether this is a constraint that results from the effect of observers or whether it is a constraint that is inherent within all wave-like systems. However, there are, as indicated above, many other issues to do with measurement that can help students appreciate how the rigorous thinking and conceptual clarity that (should) characterise philosophical thinking, including thinking about the philosophy of science, can help illuminate issues of central relevance to COVID-19.

Some of these issues are considered in school biology courses, for example, statistical issues to do with sampling (resulting from limitations on access to data), but others are less often considered with any degree of explicitness, for example, the importance of biological objects being historical products (Montévil 2019 ). Of course, measurement is only one issue with which the philosophy of science concerns itself. But I hope that I have shown that there is plenty here to profitably occupy school students when learning about COVID-19 issues.

Moral Philosophy

Moral philosophy can obviously be considered as sitting within philosophy but I have given the discipline its own section here, in part because even at school level, ethics is often given a certain prominence in biology.

As is the case with debates about the place of history in science education, there is a long-running debate about the place of ethics in science education (Reiss 1999 ). Objections to the inclusion of ethics in science education include the claim that ethics simply does not fit there on epistemological grounds (any more, for example, than aesthetics does) and that science teachers lack the expertise to teach it. Those in favour of including ethics in school science can point to the fact that mathematics is epistemologically distinct from science but we include plenty of mathematics in science and that many students find that the inclusion of ethics in science makes the subject more engaging and ‘relevant’ for them. There is also the argument that including ethics can lead to a better understanding of science (understood narrowly); for example, discussing ethical objections to in vitro fertilisation or cloning can lead to a deeper examination of questions about when human life begins and what we understand by individuality.

There are a number of ethical issues raised by COVID-19 that would make for good discussion in the classroom. I will mention two here: health care rationing and vaccination.

Health care rationing is not often discussed in school biology lessons, where the focus is more often on the acceptability of new technologies, such as genetic engineering or cloning, environmental issues, such as pollution and the loss of biodiversity as a result of human activities, and (sometimes) beginning and end of life issues. The reality, though, is that health care rationing nearly always exists, even if it is often kept hidden and even though, in countries with public health care systems, people like to presume that it does not exist. With COVID-19, the initial threat in the spring of 2020 that health care systems around the world would be overwhelmed led to a more explicit acknowledgement of health care rationing as there were near panics about the availability of ventilators and other items of equipment, not to mention the availability of doctors, nurses and other health care professionals. The ethical issues that flow from such shortages are principally to do with who gets privileged access. For example, should someone in the prime of life with young children be favoured over someone in poorer health in their 80s with no dependent relatives?

At the time of writing, we do not know whether it will be possible to develop one or more vaccines against COVID-19. Unlike health care rationing, vaccination is often covered in school biology, though the coverage can focus simply on the science with vaccination being presented as an unproblematic success story (Reiss 2018 ). After an account of Edward Jenner’s classic 1796 experiment on 8-year-old Edward Phipps (itself more than a little ethically problematic by today’s standards), graphs are presented showing dramatic decreases, thanks to vaccination, in the incidence of such diseases as smallpox and polio.

However, objections to vaccination began almost as soon as the practice was introduced. Nineteenth century objections included arguments that they did not work and were unsafe (Ernst and Jacobs 2012 ) or that their compulsory introduction (e.g. the 1853 Compulsory Vaccination Act in the UK) violated personal liberties (Durbach 2000 ). To this day, vaccination is rejected by some for much the same reasons. Such individuals are often castigated by health care experts and portrayed as selfish. I have nothing against passionate teaching and learning but in a school setting, there is the opportunity to examine more carefully the arguments for and against vaccination in a way that can be difficult in students’ homes. Such ethical examination goes hand-in-hand with mainstream science teaching—for example, teaching that if herd immunity is to help prevent the spread of a disease through vaccination, a certain percentage of the population (the percentage varies inversely with R 0 ) needs to have acquired immunity.

Done poorly, ethics teaching can become no more than a list of arguments for and against certain practices. To enhance the quality of students’ arguments, students need to be introduced to some of the main ethical frameworks—most likely consequentialism, duties and rights, and virtue ethics. My own view is that it is easier for science teachers to teach about ethics than it is for specialist ethics teachers to teach about science, which is another reason for including ethics in the science classroom rather than hoping that the ethical implications of science get covered somewhere else in the school curriculum.

However, if ethics is to be covered in school science, students need to be assessed appropriately, both formatively and summatively (Reiss 2009 ). When one looks at examples of the summative assessment of ethics in school philosophy and religious studies courses, one finds that good candidates are expected to be able to write at some length and to craft a developing argument. Furthermore, banding, rather than the allocation of precise marking points, is often employed in the mark schemes used by the organisations that set the official school examinations in philosophy and religious studies. Notable too is the expectation that candidates taking these examinations should be able to criticise major ethicists and be familiar with the contrasting views of a range of both classical (e.g. Kant, Sartre, Bentham) and contemporary (e.g. Singer) authors. At present, such features are rare to the point of non-existence when ethics is examined at the end of school science courses.

Within HPS, the contribution of sociology is probably best known through the work of T. S. Kuhn and the subsequent science wars. More generally, sociology is the discipline principally concerned with how people behave in society. The specific field of medical sociology traditionally analysed such things as patient-doctor relationships but has grown to encompass any of the cultural (as opposed to biological) effects of medical practice. In relation to COVID-19, medical sociologists (indeed, sociologists more generally) are therefore interested in such things as who gains access and who does not gain access to technologies for prevention and treatment. Classically, much sociology looked at the importance of social class, gender and ethnicity on matters like living conditions, work patterns and wages. It is already clear that all three of social class, gender and ethnicity, along with disability, are of great relevance for the likelihood of someone becoming infected by COVID-19 and dying as a result. There is therefore a normative element to medical sociology, which therefore overlaps in its interests with moral philosophy.

There is now the growing emergence of a body of specialised sociological analysis in relation to COVID-19. Sadati et al. ( 2020 ) point out that one of the most important consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak has been the worldwide creation of social anxiety. They link this to Ulrich Beck’s pioneering book Risk Society (Beck 1992 ), in which Beck (as did other sociologists such as Giddens) argued that while societies have always been exposed to risks, modern industrialised societies are particularly exposed to risks that are the result of modernisation itself. Indeed, it is clear that contemporary practices in food production and travel have at the very least fuelled the COVID-19 pandemic. Brown ( 2020 ) also hones in on issues to do with risk, pointing out that they cannot be equated with probabilities, and draws on Mary Douglas’ classic work on everyday rituals and their purpose and her assertion that ‘it is essential for each culture to believe that the other cultures cherish wrong-headed concepts of justice’ (Douglas 2007 : p. 9).

It is not, of course, my contention that school students should be introduced in science lessons to the work of sociologists like Beck and Douglas. Rather, students can be introduced, in the context of COVID-19, to sociological ways of thinking and ways of examining data and questioning human practices. Such activities can help students the better to appreciate, for example, the enormous differences between countries in terms of how they have reacted to the pandemic—denial, lockdown, social distancing, use of masks, use of technologies for contact tracing, faith in a vaccine or treatments, etc.

I have already commented how sociology overlaps with moral philosophy. It also overlaps with disciplines like politics. In my final section, before some conclusions, I examine the contributions of disciplines other than history, philosophy and sociology to science education, as exemplified by COVID-19, though I recognise that some sociologists would include much of economics and politics within their own discipline.

Other Disciplines

In schools, students are often given the impression that scientific knowledge comes first (in terms of temporality) and is then applied to technological problems. The economics behind science, the politics of the societies within which science is funded and enacted and issues to do with psychology are rarely considered. Yet, these disciplines have great influence on the science that is undertaken and then used in society. Ziman ( 2000 ) describes ‘the Legend’ as being that account of science that is entirely realist and keeps it separate from such influences.

Few school students are likely to need much persuading of the relevance of economics and politics to COVID-19. In terms of politics, COVID-19 provides an opportunity for students to consider how democratic and non-democratic governments (including those in monarchies, theocracies and totalitarian regimes) can differ in their response to events. The importance of psychology is perhaps not quite as clear—though one could try asking students why COVID-19 has caused far more draconian governmental action than other viruses that are either more dangerous (e.g. Ebola, SARS) or regularly infect huge numbers of people (e.g. the various influenzas) or to diseases such as tuberculosis (mentioned above) that, at the time of writing, kill many more people every year than COVID-19 has to date. Students can also reflect on the diversity of opinions within countries about attempt to contain the virus (Fig.  3 ) and the psychological factors that might be behind these.

Columbus COVID-19 protests at the Ohio Statehouse, USA, 18 April 2020. Taken from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/Columbus_coronavirus_protests_at_the_Ohio_Statehouse%2C_2020-04-18a.jpg/1280px-Columbus_coronavirus_protests_at_the_Ohio_Statehouse%2C_2020-04-18a.jpg

The mention of economics, politics and psychology raises the more general issues of interdisciplinarity. Back in 2013, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones published an article with the title ‘The social and political lives of zoonotic disease models: Narratives, science and policy’, the abstract of which is worth citing in its entirety:

Zoonotic diseases currently pose both major health threats and complex scientific and policy challenges, to which modelling is increasingly called to respond. In this article we argue that the challenges are best met by combining multiple models and modelling approaches that elucidate the various epidemiological, ecological and social processes at work. These models should not be understood as neutral science informing policy in a linear manner, but as having social and political lives: social, cultural and political norms and values that shape their development and which they carry and project. We develop and illustrate this argument in relation to the cases of H5N1 avian influenza and Ebola, exploring for each the range of modelling approaches deployed and the ways they have been co-constructed with a particular politics of policy. Addressing the complex, uncertain dynamics of zoonotic disease requires such social and political lives to be made explicit in approaches that aim at triangulation rather than integration, and plural and conditional rather than singular forms of policy advice. (Leach and Scoones 2013 : p. 10)

Leach and Scoones provide a powerful argument for the benefit of an interdisciplinary approach in tackling zoonoses like COVID-19.

Conclusions

Science curricula, pedagogies and assessment should not be changed in a knee-jerk reaction whenever some new science-related issue arises. Nevertheless, science curricula, perhaps especially biology ones, have a history of changing appropriately in response to important science-related issues that arise in society. It seems likely that COVID-19 constitutes such an instance.

The question then arises, for those convinced, as I am, of the value of HPS for science education, as to how HPS can usefully play a role. I have tried to sketch out some possibilities above. Of course, not everyone is convinced of the worth of HPS in school science. In such circumstances, and focusing on COVID-19, though the point holds more generally, those of us keen to see HPS playing more of a role in science education might profitably argue that the history of science, the philosophy of science and the sociology of science can all help promote scientific literacy and the public understanding of biology (cf. Reiss et al. 2020 ).

COVID-19 can also be presented as a socio-scientific issue. In a recent article, Hancock et al. ( 2019 ) examine how science teachers collaboratively design SSI-based curricula. They note that SSI curriculum design requires careful consideration of the focal SSI to ensure that it features both social and scientific components. They found that issue selection by teachers was characterised by iterative discussion in the three dimensions of leveraging existing resources, mobilising passions and exploring issue relevance. At present, COVID-19 resources are beginning to be developed and it is certainly a topic that is relevant and likely to mobilise passions.

Compliance with ethical standards

The author declares no conflict of interest.

1 The project is titled BRaSSS (Broadening Secondary School Science) and is funded by Templeton World Charities Foundation as part of their Big Questions in Classrooms programme https://www.templetonworldcharity.org/our-priorities/big-questions-classrooms .

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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March 13, 2024

COVID-19 Leaves Its Mark on the Brain. Significant Drops in IQ Scores Are Noted

Research shows that even mild COVID-19 can lead to the equivalent of seven years of brain aging

By Ziyad Al-Aly & The Conversation US

Eva Almqvist/Alamy Stock Vector

From the very early days of the pandemic, brain fog emerged as a significant health condition that many experience after COVID-19.

Brain fog is a colloquial term that describes a state of mental sluggishness or lack of clarity and haziness that makes it difficult to concentrate, remember things and think clearly.

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Fast-forward four years and there is now abundant evidence that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 – can affect brain health in many ways .

In addition to brain fog, COVID-19 can lead to an array of problems , including headaches, seizure disorders, strokes, sleep problems, and tingling and paralysis of the nerves, as well as several mental health disorders .

A large and growing body of evidence amassed throughout the pandemic details the many ways that COVID-19 leaves an indelible mark on the brain. But the specific pathways by which the virus does so are still being elucidated, and curative treatments are nonexistent.

Now, two new studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine shed further light on the profound toll of COVID-19 on cognitive health .

I am a physician scientist , and I have been devoted to studying long COVID since early patient reports about this condition – even before the term “long COVID” was coined. I have testified before the U.S. Senate as an expert witness on long COVID and have published extensively on this topic.

Here are some of the most important studies to date documenting how COVID-19 affects brain health:

Large epidemiological analyses showed that people who had COVID-19 were at an increased risk of cognitive deficits , such as memory problems.

Imaging studies done in people before and after their COVID-19 infections show shrinkage of brain volume and altered brain structure after infection .

A study of people with mild to moderate COVID-19 showed significant prolonged inflammation of the brain and changes that are commensurate with seven years of brain aging .

Severe COVID-19 that requires hospitalization or intensive care may result in cognitive deficits and other brain damage that are equivalent to 20 years of aging .

Laboratory experiments in human and mouse brain organoids designed to emulate changes in the human brain showed that SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers the fusion of brain cells . This effectively short-circuits brain electrical activity and compromises function.

Autopsy studies of people who had severe COVID-19 but died months later from other causes showed that the virus was still present in brain tissue . This provides evidence that contrary to its name, SARS-CoV-2 is not only a respiratory virus, but it can also enter the brain in some individuals. But whether the persistence of the virus in brain tissue is driving some of the brain problems seen in people who have had COVID-19 is not yet clear.

Studies show that even when the virus is mild and exclusively confined to the lungs, it can still provoke inflammation in the brain and impair brain cells’ ability to regenerate .

COVID-19 can also disrupt the blood brain barrier , the shield that protects the nervous system – which is the control and command center of our bodies – making it “leaky.” Studies using imaging to assess the brains of people hospitalized with COVID-19 showed disrupted or leaky blood brain barriers in those who experienced brain fog.

A large preliminary analysis pooling together data from 11 studies encompassing almost one million people with COVID-19 and more than 6 million uninfected individuals showed that COVID-19 increased the risk of development of new-onset dementia in people older than 60 years of age.

Autopsies have revealed devastating damage in the brains of people who died with COVID-19.

Most recently, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine assessed cognitive abilities such as memory, planning and spatial reasoning in nearly 113,000 people who had previously had COVID-19. The researchers found that those who had been infected had significant deficits in memory and executive task performance.

This decline was evident among those infected in the early phase of the pandemic and those infected when the delta and omicron variants were dominant. These findings show that the risk of cognitive decline did not abate as the pandemic virus evolved from the ancestral strain to omicron.

In the same study, those who had mild and resolved COVID-19 showed cognitive decline equivalent to a three-point loss of IQ. In comparison, those with unresolved persistent symptoms, such as people with persistent shortness of breath or fatigue, had a six-point loss in IQ. Those who had been admitted to the intensive care unit for COVID-19 had a nine-point loss in IQ. Reinfection with the virus contributed an additional two-point loss in IQ, as compared with no reinfection.

Generally the average IQ is about 100. An IQ above 130 indicates a highly gifted individual, while an IQ below 70 generally indicates a level of intellectual disability that may require significant societal support.

To put the finding of the New England Journal of Medicine study into perspective, I estimate that a three-point downward shift in IQ would increase the number of U.S. adults with an IQ less than 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million – an increase of 2.8 million adults with a level of cognitive impairment that requires significant societal support.

Another study in the same issue of the New England Journal of Medicine involved more than 100,000 Norwegians between March 2020 and April 2023. It documented worse memory function at several time points up to 36 months following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.

Taken together, these studies show that COVID-19 poses a serious risk to brain health, even in mild cases, and the effects are now being revealed at the population level.

A recent analysis of the U.S. Current Population Survey showed that after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, an additional one million working-age Americans reported having “serious difficulty” remembering, concentrating or making decisions than at any time in the preceding 15 years. Most disconcertingly, this was mostly driven by younger adults between the ages of 18 to 44.

Data from the European Union shows a similar trend – in 2022, 15 percent of people in the EU reported memory and concentration issues .

Looking ahead, it will be critical to identify who is most at risk. A better understanding is also needed of how these trends might affect the educational attainment of children and young adults and the economic productivity of working-age adults. And the extent to which these shifts will influence the epidemiology of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease is also not clear.

The growing body of research now confirms that COVID-19 should be considered a virus with a significant impact on the brain. The implications are far-reaching, from individuals experiencing cognitive struggles to the potential impact on populations and the economy.

Lifting the fog on the true causes behind these cognitive impairments, including brain fog, will require years if not decades of concerted efforts by researchers across the globe. And unfortunately, nearly everyone is a test case in this unprecedented global undertaking.

How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

Getty Images

Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

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Pandemic course improved COVID-19 knowledge, study finds

by Talia Ogliore, Washington University in St. Louis

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 1,300 students enrolled in a three-week summer immersion course, "The Pandemic: Science and Society," at Washington University in St. Louis. The innovative course envisioned by Feng Sheng Hu, the Richard G. Engelsmann Dean of Arts & Sciences, brought together experts from across WashU and around the country.

A new study published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications examines the course's impact and implications for effective public health messaging for university students going forward.

Reviewing data submitted three months after the course concluded, researchers found a person's preferred information sources made a difference in their level of knowledge, risk perception and protective behaviors. People with higher COVID knowledge practiced more protective behaviors during the fall 2020 semester.

"We can emphasize the need for protective behaviors without causing a feeling of dread," said Krista Milich, an assistant professor of biological anthropology in Arts & Sciences who designed and taught the COVID-19 course. The pandemic course used such an approach to encourage safety behaviors while reiterating that those behaviors can make a difference.

"The course also created a sense of community during a time when many people were feeling isolated," Milich said.

The course was free to all full-time WashU students and ran from Aug. 17 to Sept. 4, 2020. Students from all WashU schools participated in online lectures and discussion boards, completed quizzes and created a piece of communication—either a video, an infographic, a letter to the editor or a work of art—about the virus. Students shared their work on social media using the hashtag #COVIDcourse.

The new study analyzed data from nearly 1,000 anonymous questionnaires. The majority of respondents were WashU students (83%). About half of the respondents took the course, and another 26% had some exposure to course content, either by watching lectures online or hearing from others who attended.

Respondents said their top sources of COVID-19 information were family (52%), official health organization websites (50%), news media (47.4%), friends (38.6%) and the pandemic course (32.4%). Of these, health organizations and the course were associated with higher levels of COVID knowledge, more accurate risk perception and stronger protective behaviors.

"In our study, those who relied on social media had lower COVID knowledge scores and personal safety scores than those who relied on official sources," Milich said. Using friends or family as a primary source of information was also associated with lower COVID knowledge.

While the new analysis focuses on implications for future public health communication, the results indirectly point to a second success: WashU administrators largely achieved their goals for the course. Hu and other leaders hoped an immersive, interdisciplinary course would positively influence personal behaviors and improve compliance with recommended safety steps.

"I'm so pleased to see the positive impact the pandemic course had on our students and campus community," Hu said. "This course showcases two hallmarks of Arts & Sciences—collaboration and creativity—and I hope it can serve as a model for other universities seeking to improve public health knowledge on campus."

The benefits of such a course are wide-reaching, Milich said. A university practicing safer behaviors can ultimately protect the larger community by preventing spillovers that could affect vulnerable individuals in the area.

"Our study illustrates how universities can design a curriculum to impact the behaviors of students during a pandemic, which will likely have positive impacts on the surrounding community," Milich said. "Providing reliable and accessible public health information may be an important way to reduce harm during future global health crises."

Provided by Washington University in St. Louis

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Covid 19 Essay in English

Essay on Covid -19: In a very short amount of time, coronavirus has spread globally. It has had an enormous impact on people's lives, economy, and societies all around the world, affecting every country. Governments have had to take severe measures to try and contain the pandemic. The virus has altered our way of life in many ways, including its effects on our health and our economy. Here are a few sample essays on ‘CoronaVirus’.

100 Words Essay on Covid 19

200 words essay on covid 19, 500 words essay on covid 19.

COVID-19 or Corona Virus is a novel coronavirus that was first identified in 2019. It is similar to other coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, but it is more contagious and has caused more severe respiratory illness in people who have been infected. The novel coronavirus became a global pandemic in a very short period of time. It has affected lives, economies and societies across the world, leaving no country untouched. The virus has caused governments to take drastic measures to try and contain it. From health implications to economic and social ramifications, COVID-19 impacted every part of our lives. It has been more than 2 years since the pandemic hit and the world is still recovering from its effects.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the world has been impacted in a number of ways. For one, the global economy has taken a hit as businesses have been forced to close their doors. This has led to widespread job losses and an increase in poverty levels around the world. Additionally, countries have had to impose strict travel restrictions in an attempt to contain the virus, which has resulted in a decrease in tourism and international trade. Furthermore, the pandemic has put immense pressure on healthcare systems globally, as hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients suffering from the virus. Lastly, the outbreak has led to a general feeling of anxiety and uncertainty, as people are fearful of contracting the disease.

My Experience of COVID-19

I still remember how abruptly colleges and schools shut down in March 2020. I was a college student at that time and I was under the impression that everything would go back to normal in a few weeks. I could not have been more wrong. The situation only got worse every week and the government had to impose a lockdown. There were so many restrictions in place. For example, we had to wear face masks whenever we left the house, and we could only go out for essential errands. Restaurants and shops were only allowed to operate at take-out capacity, and many businesses were shut down.

In the current scenario, coronavirus is dominating all aspects of our lives. The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc upon people’s lives, altering the way we live and work in a very short amount of time. It has revolutionised how we think about health care, education, and even social interaction. This virus has had long-term implications on our society, including its impact on mental health, economic stability, and global politics. But we as individuals can help to mitigate these effects by taking personal responsibility to protect themselves and those around them from infection.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Education

The outbreak of coronavirus has had a significant impact on education systems around the world. In China, where the virus originated, all schools and universities were closed for several weeks in an effort to contain the spread of the disease. Many other countries have followed suit, either closing schools altogether or suspending classes for a period of time.

This has resulted in a major disruption to the education of millions of students. Some have been able to continue their studies online, but many have not had access to the internet or have not been able to afford the costs associated with it. This has led to a widening of the digital divide between those who can afford to continue their education online and those who cannot.

The closure of schools has also had a negative impact on the mental health of many students. With no face-to-face contact with friends and teachers, some students have felt isolated and anxious. This has been compounded by the worry and uncertainty surrounding the virus itself.

The situation with coronavirus has improved and schools have been reopened but students are still catching up with the gap of 2 years that the pandemic created. In the meantime, governments and educational institutions are working together to find ways to support students and ensure that they are able to continue their education despite these difficult circumstances.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Economy

The outbreak of the coronavirus has had a significant impact on the global economy. The virus, which originated in China, has spread to over two hundred countries, resulting in widespread panic and a decrease in global trade. As a result of the outbreak, many businesses have been forced to close their doors, leading to a rise in unemployment. In addition, the stock market has taken a severe hit.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Health

The effects that coronavirus has on one's health are still being studied and researched as the virus continues to spread throughout the world. However, some of the potential effects on health that have been observed thus far include respiratory problems, fever, and coughing. In severe cases, pneumonia, kidney failure, and death can occur. It is important for people who think they may have been exposed to the virus to seek medical attention immediately so that they can be treated properly and avoid any serious complications. There is no specific cure or treatment for coronavirus at this time, but there are ways to help ease symptoms and prevent the virus from spreading.

Explore Career Options (By Industry)

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Bio Medical Engineer

The field of biomedical engineering opens up a universe of expert chances. An Individual in the biomedical engineering career path work in the field of engineering as well as medicine, in order to find out solutions to common problems of the two fields. The biomedical engineering job opportunities are to collaborate with doctors and researchers to develop medical systems, equipment, or devices that can solve clinical problems. Here we will be discussing jobs after biomedical engineering, how to get a job in biomedical engineering, biomedical engineering scope, and salary. 

Data Administrator

Database professionals use software to store and organise data such as financial information, and customer shipping records. Individuals who opt for a career as data administrators ensure that data is available for users and secured from unauthorised sales. DB administrators may work in various types of industries. It may involve computer systems design, service firms, insurance companies, banks and hospitals.

Ethical Hacker

A career as ethical hacker involves various challenges and provides lucrative opportunities in the digital era where every giant business and startup owns its cyberspace on the world wide web. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path try to find the vulnerabilities in the cyber system to get its authority. If he or she succeeds in it then he or she gets its illegal authority. Individuals in the ethical hacker career path then steal information or delete the file that could affect the business, functioning, or services of the organization.

Data Analyst

The invention of the database has given fresh breath to the people involved in the data analytics career path. Analysis refers to splitting up a whole into its individual components for individual analysis. Data analysis is a method through which raw data are processed and transformed into information that would be beneficial for user strategic thinking.

Data are collected and examined to respond to questions, evaluate hypotheses or contradict theories. It is a tool for analyzing, transforming, modeling, and arranging data with useful knowledge, to assist in decision-making and methods, encompassing various strategies, and is used in different fields of business, research, and social science.

Geothermal Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as geothermal engineers are the professionals involved in the processing of geothermal energy. The responsibilities of geothermal engineers may vary depending on the workplace location. Those who work in fields design facilities to process and distribute geothermal energy. They oversee the functioning of machinery used in the field.

Remote Sensing Technician

Individuals who opt for a career as a remote sensing technician possess unique personalities. Remote sensing analysts seem to be rational human beings, they are strong, independent, persistent, sincere, realistic and resourceful. Some of them are analytical as well, which means they are intelligent, introspective and inquisitive. 

Remote sensing scientists use remote sensing technology to support scientists in fields such as community planning, flight planning or the management of natural resources. Analysing data collected from aircraft, satellites or ground-based platforms using statistical analysis software, image analysis software or Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a significant part of their work. Do you want to learn how to become remote sensing technician? There's no need to be concerned; we've devised a simple remote sensing technician career path for you. Scroll through the pages and read.

Geotechnical engineer

The role of geotechnical engineer starts with reviewing the projects needed to define the required material properties. The work responsibilities are followed by a site investigation of rock, soil, fault distribution and bedrock properties on and below an area of interest. The investigation is aimed to improve the ground engineering design and determine their engineering properties that include how they will interact with, on or in a proposed construction. 

The role of geotechnical engineer in mining includes designing and determining the type of foundations, earthworks, and or pavement subgrades required for the intended man-made structures to be made. Geotechnical engineering jobs are involved in earthen and concrete dam construction projects, working under a range of normal and extreme loading conditions. 

Cartographer

How fascinating it is to represent the whole world on just a piece of paper or a sphere. With the help of maps, we are able to represent the real world on a much smaller scale. Individuals who opt for a career as a cartographer are those who make maps. But, cartography is not just limited to maps, it is about a mixture of art , science , and technology. As a cartographer, not only you will create maps but use various geodetic surveys and remote sensing systems to measure, analyse, and create different maps for political, cultural or educational purposes.

Budget Analyst

Budget analysis, in a nutshell, entails thoroughly analyzing the details of a financial budget. The budget analysis aims to better understand and manage revenue. Budget analysts assist in the achievement of financial targets, the preservation of profitability, and the pursuit of long-term growth for a business. Budget analysts generally have a bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, economics, or a closely related field. Knowledge of Financial Management is of prime importance in this career.

Product Manager

A Product Manager is a professional responsible for product planning and marketing. He or she manages the product throughout the Product Life Cycle, gathering and prioritising the product. A product manager job description includes defining the product vision and working closely with team members of other departments to deliver winning products.  

Underwriter

An underwriter is a person who assesses and evaluates the risk of insurance in his or her field like mortgage, loan, health policy, investment, and so on and so forth. The underwriter career path does involve risks as analysing the risks means finding out if there is a way for the insurance underwriter jobs to recover the money from its clients. If the risk turns out to be too much for the company then in the future it is an underwriter who will be held accountable for it. Therefore, one must carry out his or her job with a lot of attention and diligence.

Finance Executive

Operations manager.

Individuals in the operations manager jobs are responsible for ensuring the efficiency of each department to acquire its optimal goal. They plan the use of resources and distribution of materials. The operations manager's job description includes managing budgets, negotiating contracts, and performing administrative tasks.

Bank Probationary Officer (PO)

Investment director.

An investment director is a person who helps corporations and individuals manage their finances. They can help them develop a strategy to achieve their goals, including paying off debts and investing in the future. In addition, he or she can help individuals make informed decisions.

Welding Engineer

Welding Engineer Job Description: A Welding Engineer work involves managing welding projects and supervising welding teams. He or she is responsible for reviewing welding procedures, processes and documentation. A career as Welding Engineer involves conducting failure analyses and causes on welding issues. 

Transportation Planner

A career as Transportation Planner requires technical application of science and technology in engineering, particularly the concepts, equipment and technologies involved in the production of products and services. In fields like land use, infrastructure review, ecological standards and street design, he or she considers issues of health, environment and performance. A Transportation Planner assigns resources for implementing and designing programmes. He or she is responsible for assessing needs, preparing plans and forecasts and compliance with regulations.

An expert in plumbing is aware of building regulations and safety standards and works to make sure these standards are upheld. Testing pipes for leakage using air pressure and other gauges, and also the ability to construct new pipe systems by cutting, fitting, measuring and threading pipes are some of the other more involved aspects of plumbing. Individuals in the plumber career path are self-employed or work for a small business employing less than ten people, though some might find working for larger entities or the government more desirable.

Construction Manager

Individuals who opt for a career as construction managers have a senior-level management role offered in construction firms. Responsibilities in the construction management career path are assigning tasks to workers, inspecting their work, and coordinating with other professionals including architects, subcontractors, and building services engineers.

Urban Planner

Urban Planning careers revolve around the idea of developing a plan to use the land optimally, without affecting the environment. Urban planning jobs are offered to those candidates who are skilled in making the right use of land to distribute the growing population, to create various communities. 

Urban planning careers come with the opportunity to make changes to the existing cities and towns. They identify various community needs and make short and long-term plans accordingly.

Highway Engineer

Highway Engineer Job Description:  A Highway Engineer is a civil engineer who specialises in planning and building thousands of miles of roads that support connectivity and allow transportation across the country. He or she ensures that traffic management schemes are effectively planned concerning economic sustainability and successful implementation.

Environmental Engineer

Individuals who opt for a career as an environmental engineer are construction professionals who utilise the skills and knowledge of biology, soil science, chemistry and the concept of engineering to design and develop projects that serve as solutions to various environmental problems. 

Naval Architect

A Naval Architect is a professional who designs, produces and repairs safe and sea-worthy surfaces or underwater structures. A Naval Architect stays involved in creating and designing ships, ferries, submarines and yachts with implementation of various principles such as gravity, ideal hull form, buoyancy and stability. 

Orthotist and Prosthetist

Orthotists and Prosthetists are professionals who provide aid to patients with disabilities. They fix them to artificial limbs (prosthetics) and help them to regain stability. There are times when people lose their limbs in an accident. In some other occasions, they are born without a limb or orthopaedic impairment. Orthotists and prosthetists play a crucial role in their lives with fixing them to assistive devices and provide mobility.

Veterinary Doctor

Pathologist.

A career in pathology in India is filled with several responsibilities as it is a medical branch and affects human lives. The demand for pathologists has been increasing over the past few years as people are getting more aware of different diseases. Not only that, but an increase in population and lifestyle changes have also contributed to the increase in a pathologist’s demand. The pathology careers provide an extremely huge number of opportunities and if you want to be a part of the medical field you can consider being a pathologist. If you want to know more about a career in pathology in India then continue reading this article.

Speech Therapist

Gynaecologist.

Gynaecology can be defined as the study of the female body. The job outlook for gynaecology is excellent since there is evergreen demand for one because of their responsibility of dealing with not only women’s health but also fertility and pregnancy issues. Although most women prefer to have a women obstetrician gynaecologist as their doctor, men also explore a career as a gynaecologist and there are ample amounts of male doctors in the field who are gynaecologists and aid women during delivery and childbirth. 

An oncologist is a specialised doctor responsible for providing medical care to patients diagnosed with cancer. He or she uses several therapies to control the cancer and its effect on the human body such as chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy and biopsy. An oncologist designs a treatment plan based on a pathology report after diagnosing the type of cancer and where it is spreading inside the body.

Audiologist

The audiologist career involves audiology professionals who are responsible to treat hearing loss and proactively preventing the relevant damage. Individuals who opt for a career as an audiologist use various testing strategies with the aim to determine if someone has a normal sensitivity to sounds or not. After the identification of hearing loss, a hearing doctor is required to determine which sections of the hearing are affected, to what extent they are affected, and where the wound causing the hearing loss is found. As soon as the hearing loss is identified, the patients are provided with recommendations for interventions and rehabilitation such as hearing aids, cochlear implants, and appropriate medical referrals. While audiology is a branch of science that studies and researches hearing, balance, and related disorders.

Hospital Administrator

The hospital Administrator is in charge of organising and supervising the daily operations of medical services and facilities. This organising includes managing of organisation’s staff and its members in service, budgets, service reports, departmental reporting and taking reminders of patient care and services.

For an individual who opts for a career as an actor, the primary responsibility is to completely speak to the character he or she is playing and to persuade the crowd that the character is genuine by connecting with them and bringing them into the story. This applies to significant roles and littler parts, as all roles join to make an effective creation. Here in this article, we will discuss how to become an actor in India, actor exams, actor salary in India, and actor jobs. 

Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats create and direct original routines for themselves, in addition to developing interpretations of existing routines. The work of circus acrobats can be seen in a variety of performance settings, including circus, reality shows, sports events like the Olympics, movies and commercials. Individuals who opt for a career as acrobats must be prepared to face rejections and intermittent periods of work. The creativity of acrobats may extend to other aspects of the performance. For example, acrobats in the circus may work with gym trainers, celebrities or collaborate with other professionals to enhance such performance elements as costume and or maybe at the teaching end of the career.

Video Game Designer

Career as a video game designer is filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. A video game designer is someone who is involved in the process of creating a game from day one. He or she is responsible for fulfilling duties like designing the character of the game, the several levels involved, plot, art and similar other elements. Individuals who opt for a career as a video game designer may also write the codes for the game using different programming languages.

Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

Choreographer

The word “choreography" actually comes from Greek words that mean “dance writing." Individuals who opt for a career as a choreographer create and direct original dances, in addition to developing interpretations of existing dances. A Choreographer dances and utilises his or her creativity in other aspects of dance performance. For example, he or she may work with the music director to select music or collaborate with other famous choreographers to enhance such performance elements as lighting, costume and set design.

Videographer

Multimedia specialist.

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications. 

Social Media Manager

A career as social media manager involves implementing the company’s or brand’s marketing plan across all social media channels. Social media managers help in building or improving a brand’s or a company’s website traffic, build brand awareness, create and implement marketing and brand strategy. Social media managers are key to important social communication as well.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook. 

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion. 

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article. 

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Linguistic meaning is related to language or Linguistics which is the study of languages. A career as a linguistic meaning, a profession that is based on the scientific study of language, and it's a very broad field with many specialities. Famous linguists work in academia, researching and teaching different areas of language, such as phonetics (sounds), syntax (word order) and semantics (meaning). 

Other researchers focus on specialities like computational linguistics, which seeks to better match human and computer language capacities, or applied linguistics, which is concerned with improving language education. Still, others work as language experts for the government, advertising companies, dictionary publishers and various other private enterprises. Some might work from home as freelance linguists. Philologist, phonologist, and dialectician are some of Linguist synonym. Linguists can study French , German , Italian . 

Public Relation Executive

Travel journalist.

The career of a travel journalist is full of passion, excitement and responsibility. Journalism as a career could be challenging at times, but if you're someone who has been genuinely enthusiastic about all this, then it is the best decision for you. Travel journalism jobs are all about insightful, artfully written, informative narratives designed to cover the travel industry. Travel Journalist is someone who explores, gathers and presents information as a news article.

Quality Controller

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product. 

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Production Manager

Merchandiser.

A QA Lead is in charge of the QA Team. The role of QA Lead comes with the responsibility of assessing services and products in order to determine that he or she meets the quality standards. He or she develops, implements and manages test plans. 

Metallurgical Engineer

A metallurgical engineer is a professional who studies and produces materials that bring power to our world. He or she extracts metals from ores and rocks and transforms them into alloys, high-purity metals and other materials used in developing infrastructure, transportation and healthcare equipment. 

Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems. 

AWS Solution Architect

An AWS Solution Architect is someone who specializes in developing and implementing cloud computing systems. He or she has a good understanding of the various aspects of cloud computing and can confidently deploy and manage their systems. He or she troubleshoots the issues and evaluates the risk from the third party. 

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

ITSM Manager

Information security manager.

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack 

Business Intelligence Developer

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COVID-19 antibody discovery could explain long COVID

UVA Health researchers have discovered a potential explanation for some of the most perplexing mysteries of COVID-19 and long COVID. The surprising findings could lead to new treatments for the difficult acute effects of COVID-19, long COVID and possibly other viruses.

Researchers led by UVA's Steven L. Zeichner, MD, PhD, found that COVID-19 may prompt some people's bodies to make antibodies that act like enzymes that the body naturally uses to regulate important functions -- blood pressure, for example. Related enzymes also regulate other important body functions, such as blood clotting and inflammation.

Doctors may be able to target these "abzymes" to stop their unwanted effects. If abzymes with rogue activities are also responsible for some of the features of long COVID, doctors could target the abzymes to treat the difficult and sometimes mysterious symptoms of COVID-19 and long COVID at the source, instead of merely treating the downstream symptoms.

"Some patients with COVID-19 have serious symptoms and we have trouble understanding their cause. We also have a poor understanding of the causes of long COVID," said Zeichner, a pediatric infectious disease expert at UVA Children's. "Antibodies that act like enzymes are called 'abzymes.' Abzymes are not exact copies of enzymes and so they work differently, sometimes in ways that the original enzyme does not. If COVID-19 patients are making abzymes, it is possible that these rogue abzymes could harm many different aspects of physiology. If this turns out to be true, then developing treatments to deplete or block the rogue abzymes could be the most effective way to treat the complications of COVID-19."

Understanding COVID-19 Abzymes

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, has protein on its surface called the Spike protein. When the virus begins to infect a cell, the Spike protein binds a protein called Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2, or ACE2, on the cell's surface. ACE2's normal function in the body is to help regulate blood pressure; it cuts a protein called angiotensin II to make a derivative protein called angiotensin 1-7. Angiotensin II constricts blood vessels, raising blood pressure, while angiotensin 1-7 relaxes blood vessels, lowering blood pressure.

Zeichner and his team thought that some patients might make antibodies against the Spike protein that looked enough like ACE2 so that the antibodies also had enzymatic activity like ACE2, and that is exactly what they found.

Recently, other groups have found that some patients with long COVID have problems with their coagulation systems and with another system called "complement." Both the coagulation system and the complement system are controlled by enzymes in the body that cut other proteins to activate them. If patients with long COVID make abzymes that activate proteins that control processes such as coagulation and inflammation, that could explain the source of some of the long COVID symptoms and why long COVID symptoms persist even after the body has cleared the initial infection. It also may explain rare side effects of COVID-19 vaccination.

To determine if antibodies could be having unexpected effects in COVID patients, Zeichner and his collaborators examined plasma samples collected from 67 volunteers with moderate or severe COVID on or around day 7 of their hospitalization. The researchers compared what they found with plasma collected in 2018, prior to the beginning of the pandemic. The results showed that a small subset of the COVID patients had antibodies that acted like enzymes.

While our understanding of the potential role of abzymes in COVID-19 is still in its early stages, enzymatic antibodies have already been detected in certain cases of HIV, Zeichner notes. That means there is precedent for a virus to trigger abzyme formation. It also suggests that other viruses may cause similar effects.

Zeichner, who is developing a universal coronavirus vaccine, expects UVA's new findings will renew interest in abzymes in medical research. He also hopes his discovery will lead to better treatments for patients with both acute COVID-19 and long COVID.

"We now need to study pure versions of antibodies with enzymatic activity to see how abzymes may work in more detail, and we need to study patients who have had COVID-19 who did and did not develop long COVID," he said. "There is much more work to do, but I think we have made a good start in developing a new understanding of this challenging disease that has caused so much distress and death around the world. The first step to developing effective new therapies for a disease is developing a good understanding of the disease's underlying causes, and we have taken that first step."

Findings Published

The researchers have published their findings in the scientific journal mBio , a publication of the American Society for Microbiology. The research team consisted of Yufeng Song, Regan Myers, Frances Mehl, Lila Murphy, Bailey Brooks, and faculty members from the Department of Medicine, Jeffrey M. Wilson, Alexandra Kadl, Judith Woodfolk.

"It's great to have such talented and dedicated colleagues here at UVA who are excited about working on new and unconventional research projects," said Zeichner.

Zeichner is the McClemore Birdsong Professor in the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Departments of Pediatrics and Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology; the director of the Pendleton Pediatric Infectious Disease Laboratory; and part of UVA Children's Child Health Research Center.

The abzyme research was supported by UVA, including the Manning Fund for COVID-19 Research at UVA; the Ivy Foundation; the Pendleton Laboratory Fund for Pediatric Infectious Disease Research; a College Council Minerva Research Grant; the Coulter Foundation; and the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases, grant R01 AI176515. Additional support came from the HHV-6 Foundation.

• COVID and SARS
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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Virginia Health System . Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference :

• Yufeng Song, Regan Myers, Frances Mehl, Lila Murphy, Bailey Brooks, Jeffrey M. Wilson, Alexandra Kadl, Judith Woodfolk, Steven L. Zeichner. ACE-2-like enzymatic activity is associated with immunoglobulin in COVID-19 patients . mBio , 2024; DOI: 10.1128/mbio.00541-24

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No, DNA fragments in COVID-19 vaccines aren't linked to 'major safety concerns' | Fact check

The claim: dna fragments in covid-19 vaccines are harmful to humans.

A March 16 Instagram post ( direct link , archive link ) shares a news report about a warning issued by the Florida surgeon general of purported risks associated with DNA fragments in COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

“There Are Major Safety Concerns With Covid Vaccines Amid The Discovery Of Billions Of DNA Fragments In Both Pfizer And Moderna Vaccines,” reads part of the post's caption. It goes on to claim these DNA fragments in the vaccines change healthy cells into cancerous cells and cause “chromosomal instability,” among other reactions.

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The post echoes claims made by Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, and links to news coverage of his statements.

The post was liked more than 2,000 times in less than two weeks.

More from the Fact-Check Team: How we pick and research claims | Email newsletter | Facebook page

Our rating: False

There is no evidence DNA fragments in COVID-19 vaccines pose any risk, according to the Food and Drug Administration and multiple medical experts. Such fragments are often found in vaccines for viruses. Experts say the leftover material does not cause cancer, lacks a way to get into a cell’s nucleus to change it and is found in too small of a quantity to alter a cell's DNA.

Experts say fear of DNA integration defies science

DNA fragments are found in many viral vaccines as an active ingredient or the byproducts of the manufacturing process, according to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Viruses are usually grown in cells, and some fragments can make their way through filtration processes into the finished vaccine.

Ladapo has claimed that DNA fragments in the COVID-19 vaccines could cause "chromosomal instability" or transform healthy cells into cancerous ones through insertional mutagenesis , where a foreign DNA sequence integrates with a host organism's genome.

But Dr. Paul Offit , director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Philadelphia hospital, told USA TODAY there are several reasons why this is not the case.

First, none of the materials used in manufacturing vaccines contain oncogenes , which are genes known to cause cancer, he said. Second, there are only nanograms – or one-billionth of a gram – of DNA fragments left in vaccine shots when they are delivered. Researchers find they need to use micrograms – one-millionth of a gram – of DNA when trying to integrate foreign DNA into another cell.

Cytoplasm , a liquid that fills the inside of a cell, is also hostile to foreign DNA and attacks any that enters the cell, according to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia . That is if the foreign DNA from the vaccines is able to enter the cell, which is impossible without an access signal to get through the nuclear membrane of the host's DNA. The foreign DNA does not have such an access signal and also lacks the enzyme needed to integrate with the host cell’s DNA, Offit said.

“It is a millionth of the DNA you would need, and it would never get out of the cytoplasm, and even if it did, it’s not an oncogene,” Offit said. “There’s just zero chance of that happening.”

Dr. Taison Bell , a critical care doctor at UVA Health, told USA TODAY people ingest foreign DNA in many different ways without suffering negative consequences. He pointed to a 2013 study in the journal Plos One showing that far larger quantities of foreign DNA end up in the bloodstream from the food people eat.

“There’s a reason we don’t worry about sprouting gills after eating fish,” Bell said in an email.

Fact check : False claim COVID-19 vaccines are linked to 'spike' in cancer cases

The FDA has also weighed in on the topic, sending a letter to Ladapo spelling out why his concerns over DNA contamination are unfounded. The letter makes similar points to those of Offit and Bell. It also highlights the lack of reported adverse effects related to DNA fragments and research that demonstrates there is no evidence of genetic contamination from the vaccines.

"With over a billion doses of the mRNA vaccines administered, no safety concerns related to residual DNA have been identified," Dr. Peter Marks , director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, wrote in the letter. "Studies have been conducted in animals using the modified mRNA and lipid nanoparticle together that constitute the vaccine, including the minute quantities of residual DNA fragments left over after DNAse treatment during manufacturing, and demonstrate no evidence for genotoxicity from the vaccine.”

The Instagram post points out that the American Cancer Society projects there will be more than 2 million new cases of cancer in the country in 2024. But as USA TODAY previously reported , the organization in no way links the uptick to COVID-19 vaccines. The National Cancer Institute also says mRNA vaccines have not been linked to cancer.

The post further claims the vaccines affect the lungs, brain, heart and injection site. While there have been rare reports of organ issues after vaccination, none have been severe or prominent enough to warrant guidance from the FDA or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention beyond acknowledgment of the slightly elevated risk of heart inflammation for adolescents and young adults. Injection site reactions beyond the swelling and bruising seen with many vaccines have been rare and benign , resolving within weeks.

Both the FDA and the CDC continue to recommend COVID-19 vaccines as a safe and effective way to combat COVID-19.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the claim for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Our fact-check sources:

• Dr. Paul Offit , March 25, Phone interview with USA TODAY
• Dr. Taison Bell , March 25, Email exchange with USA TODAY
• Food and Drug Administration, Dec. 14, 2023, Letter to Joseph Ladapo
• National Cancer Institute, updated Oct. 10, COVID-19 Vaccines and People with Cancer
• USA TODAY, Jan. 9, US government hasn't reported 'surge' in cancer among vaccinated people | Fact check
• American Cancer Society, accessed Jan. 3,  COVID-19 Vaccines in People with Cancer
• National Cancer Institute, accessed Jan. 3,  COVID-19 Vaccines and People with Cancer
• PLOS ONE, 2013, Complete Genes May Pass from Food to Human Blood

Thank you for supporting our journalism. You can subscribe to our print edition, ad-free app or e-newspaper here .

USA TODAY is a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network, which requires a demonstrated commitment to nonpartisanship, fairness and transparency. Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Meta .

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: No, DNA fragments in COVID-19 vaccines aren't linked to 'major safety concerns' | Fact check

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Guest Essay

How the SAT Changed My Life

By Emi Nietfeld

Ms. Nietfeld is the author of the memoir “Acceptance.”

This month, the University of Texas, Austin, joined the wave of selective schools reversing Covid-era test-optional admissions policies, once again requiring applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.

Many colleges have embraced the test-optional rule under the assumption that it bolsters equity and diversity, since higher scores are correlated with privilege. But it turns out that these policies harmed the teenagers they were supposed to help. Many low-income and minority applicants withheld scores that could have gotten them in, wrongly assuming that their scores were too low, according to an analysis by Dartmouth. More top universities are sure to join the reversal. This is a good thing.

I was one of the disadvantaged youths who are often failed by test-optional policies, striving to get into college while in foster care and homeless. We hear a lot about the efforts of these elite schools to attract diverse student bodies and about debates around the best way to assemble a class. What these conversations overlook is the hope these tests offer students who are in difficult situations.

For many of us, standardized tests provided our one shot to prove our potential, despite the obstacles in our lives or the untidy pasts we had. We found solace in the objectivity of a hard number and a process that — unlike many things in our lives — we could control. I will always feel tenderness toward the Scantron sheets that unlocked higher education and a better life.

Growing up, I fantasized about escaping the chaos of my family for the peace of a grassy quad. Both my parents had mental health issues. My adolescence was its own mess. Over two years I took a dozen psychiatric drugs while attending four different high school programs. At 14, I was sent to a locked facility where my education consisted of work sheets and reading aloud in an on-site classroom. In a life skills class, we learned how to get our G.E.D.s. My college dreams began to seem like delusions.

Then one afternoon a staff member handed me a library copy of “Barron’s Guide to the ACT .” I leafed through the onionskin pages and felt a thunderclap of possibility. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without permission, let alone take Advanced Placement Latin or play water polo or do something else that would impress elite colleges. But I could teach myself the years of math I’d missed while switching schools and improve my life in this one specific way.

After nine months in the institution, I entered foster care. I started my sophomore year at yet another high school, only to have my foster parents shuffle my course load at midyear, when they decided Advanced Placement classes were bad for me. In part because of academic instability like this, only 3 percent to 4 percent of former foster youth get a four-year college degree.

Later I bounced between friends’ sofas and the back seat of my rusty Corolla, using my new-to-me SAT prep book as a pillow. I had no idea when I’d next shower, but I could crack open practice problems and dip into a meditative trance. For those moments, everything was still, the terror of my daily life softened by the fantasy that my efforts might land me in a dorm room of my own, with endless hot water and an extra-long twin bed.

Standardized tests allowed me to look forward, even as every other part of college applications focused on the past. The song and dance of personal statements required me to demonstrate all the obstacles I’d overcome while I was still in the middle of them. When shilling my trauma left me gutted and raw, researching answer elimination strategies was a balm. I could focus on equations and readings, like the scholar I wanted to be, rather than the desperate teenager that I was.

Test-optional policies would have confounded me, but in the 2009-10 admissions cycle, I had to submit my scores; my fellow hopefuls and I were all in this together, slogging through multiple-choice questions until our backs ached and our eyes crossed.

The hope these exams instilled in me wasn’t abstract: It manifested in hundreds of glossy brochures. After I took the PSAT in my junior year, universities that had received my score flooded me with letters urging me to apply. For once, I felt wanted. These marketing materials informed me that the top universities offered generous financial aid that would allow me to attend free. I set my sights higher, despite my guidance counselor’s lack of faith.

When I took the actual SAT, I was ashamed of my score. Had submitting it been optional, I most likely wouldn’t have done it, because I suspected my score was lower than the prep-school applicants I was up against (exactly what Dartmouth found in the analysis that led it to reinstate testing requirements). When you grow up the way I did, it’s difficult to believe that you are ever good enough.

When I got into Harvard, it felt like a miracle splitting my life into a before and after. My exam preparation paid off on campus — it was the only reason I knew geometry or grammar — and it motivated me to tackle new, difficult topics. I majored in computer science, having never written a line of code. Though a career as a software engineer seemed far-fetched, I used my SAT study strategies to prepare for technical interviews (in which you’re given one or more problems to solve) that landed me the stable, lucrative Google job that catapulted me out of financial insecurity.

I’m not the only one who feels affection for these tests. At Harvard, I met other students who saw these exams as the one door they could unlock that opened into a new future. I was lucky that the tests offered me hope all along, that I could cling to the promise that one day I could bubble in a test form and find myself transported into a better life — the one I lead today.

Emi Nietfeld is the author of the memoir “ Acceptance .” Previously, she was a software engineer at Google and Facebook.

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