March 5, 2025: COVID's fifth anniversary. Plus, life might have arisen very early in the universe, and gene analyses of bird flu reveal more clues about how it's evolving. —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | | An artist's impression of some of the universe's first stars. NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/Spaceengine/M. Zamani (CC BY 4.0) | | | • In his State of the Union Speech, President Trump pushed fossil fuel extraction, a plan for developing critical minerals and an Alaska natural gas pipeline. | 3 min read | | | • Most clicked yesterday: Does stopping Ozempic cause rebound weight-gain and health problems? | 7 min read | | | Health care workers at the COVID Unit at United Memorial Medical Center in Houston in July 2020. Medical providers were overwhelmed during the worst weeks of the pandemic.Mark Felix / AFP/Getty Images | | | COVID's Fifth Anniversary | Next Tuesday, March 11, marks the fifth anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring COVID a pandemic. Months earlier, a mysterious new virus began causing pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and it quickly spread around the world, triggering lockdowns, overwhelming hospitals and causing high death tolls. But things look different today: COVID kills or hospitalizes far fewer people (fatality rates are still higher than the flu), and effective vaccines and treatments exist. The virus is well on its way to being endemic—it's always circulating and causing illness, including long COVID. We might say we're in the COVID aftermath. So what have we learned? | | | Amanda Montañez; Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (data) | | | The bad: Looking back, there were many mistakes, successes and lessons. Early inconsistent messaging around how the virus spread, flip-flop stances on whether masks were needed, and misinformation from political leaders fed an atmosphere of uncertainty, and eventually a lingering distrust in science.
The good: But there were also major successes, chiefly the development of mRNA vaccines that saved millions of lives. That technology has since exploded, and mRNA vaccines are in development for an array of illnesses including the flu and cancer. Despite having experienced a global pandemic we surprisingly may be less prepared to handle the threat of another one, like bird flu. Political polarization and a presidential administration that rejects science and expertise are roadblocks.
What the experts say: "It's been a pretty difficult five years for everyone, for the whole world," says Maria Van Kerkhove, technical lead for COVID response at the World Health Organization. "I think the whole world wants to forget that it happened and move on, which is completely understandable, because we've gone through something that has been tremendously difficult," she says. But "I think we need to make it very clear that COVID is not gone." And neither are future disease threats. —Tanya Lewis, senior health editor | | | • "Big technology companies like Microsoft and Google have made headlines in the last six months for announcing big advances in quantum computing capabilities (new processors and chips). We would all do well to remain skeptical, writes Dan Vergano, senior opinion editor at Scientific American, despite the advances. "The fundamental problem remains, however, that making robust 'qubits' at the heart of a quantum computer—as opposed to the simpler 'bits' processed by your laptop one—is hard-to-do physics," he says. "News-release-driven announcements of new chips, with accompanying Wall Street hype, threaten a new kind of tech bubble just as the AI one is fading, which may explain a lot of the attention on the technology." | 4 min read | | | • James Harrison, an Australian railway clerk who helped save 2.4 million babies by donating the rare antibodies in his blood every two weeks for more than 60 years, died last month. | The Washington Post | • The organ transplant waiting list was made to be a fair system where the sickest patients get organs first. More and more the list is being ignored. | The New York Times | • See the compelling graphs and charts depicting how the accuracy of weather forecasting has improved over the last decades. | Our World in Data | | | I'd guess that it will take many years to fully comprehend the impact of the global COVID pandemic. Considering that the virus is still killing more people each year than the flu, we remain in the thick of adapting to this new disease. Scientists are conducting studies of how the virus amps up inflammation, and causes long COVID. And that's to say nothing of the sociological impact. As we wrote about a year into the pandemic, the virus upended life at unprecedented scope and speed, launching the biggest social experiment in modern history. I'm sure scientists will be gleaning insight for decades from how the world responded to such widespread adversity. | Thanks for reading Today in Science. Send questions and comments to: newsletters@sciam.com. See you tomorrow. | —Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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