Have we learned anything?

Searching for “COVID-19 lessons learned” on PubMed gives you 4840 results—a long list of opinion pieces, reviews, and consensus statements telling us what we can learn from our recent pandemic experience. At the same time, 138 dairy herds in the USA have recorded H5N1 avian influenza outbreaks and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has reported an mpox outbreak with 23 626 cases, with little signs that either outbreak will be contained soon. The lack of urgency and scale in the responses to both outbreaks is deeply frustrating and questions whether anything has been learned from the COVID-19 experience.

 

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for early action, widespread testing, open data sharing, and strong public health responses. By contrast, it is unclear how many farms and cows have been tested for the highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus, where and when tests have been done, and how many samples have been sequenced. Testing is largely voluntary, and uptake has been low, so the true extent of spread is unclear. Similarly, while four human cases of H5N1 have been confirmed, only 53 people have been tested overall, a number that seems inadequately low. Furthermore, the support for farmers facing outbreaks is limited, as are measures to contain spread. Of course, it is much easier to contain outbreaks in poultry, as the value of a chicken is magnitudes lower than that of a cow, culling flocks seems like an obvious step as many birds would die from infection anyway, and the world has decades of experience in dealing with poultry outbreaks.