Five years ago, a previously unknown virus sickened a number of people in Wuhan, China. The virus or the disease it causes did not have a name at first.
The virus led to a pandemic that exposed global inequities in health care and reshaped perceptions of how to manage waves of disease caused by deadly, borderless viruses.
The virus was the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease was COVID-19.
Five years later, the virus is with us, but it’s less deadly than it was at first. Vaccines and infections have strengthened people’s immunity.
These five things we know and don’t know about the coronavirus now.
1. Where did the SARS-CoV-2 virus come from?
We still don’t know this for sure.
Virus researchers believe that the bats probably carried the virus, as they typically carry coronaviruses.
Most likely, the bats infected other animals, from which the transfer of the virus to humans was finally possible when handling them at the Wuhan market in China.
This has been the route of transmission for similar viruses such as the SARS virus. The theory has not been proven.
Wuhan is home to several laboratories that have collected and studied coronaviruses. An equally unproven theory is that the virus escaped from the laboratory.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said on the eve of the five-year anniversary that China still has not provided all the data it has and has blocked free data collection.
China has denied the accusations.
2. How many deaths has COVID-19 claimed?
This is just an estimate.
The WHO says its member countries have reported more than seven million deaths linked to the coronavirus. It estimates that the real number is at least three times higher, i.e. more than 20 million.
Corona is nowhere the leading cause of death, even though the virus that caused it still lives among us.
The CDC, the leading U.S. health authority, says that over the past year, COVID-19 was responsible for 900 deaths in the country every week. The virus still treats elderly people the hardest.
According to the statistics of the Institute of Health and Welfare, in 2023 in Finland, COVID-19 led to or contributed to the death of more than 2,500 people.
3. How did vaccines become available?
Vaccine experts and pharmaceutical companies broke the speed record in vaccine development.
Vaccines are estimated to have saved the lives of tens of millions of people in the world, and they were the key to normalizing life.
British grandmother Margaret Keenan already received the first vaccine in December 2020. Also in Finland, the first nurses also received the vaccine after the Christmas holidays in 2020.
Vaccinations revealed the global inequality of health care. The distribution of vaccines was slow in poor countries.
WHO estimates that more than 13 billion corona vaccines have been administered worldwide. They have not provided 100% protection, but they have reduced the number of serious cases requiring hospitalization and deaths.
Vaccines are updated regularly because the virus is constantly mutating. BioNTech-Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccines are currently in use in Finland.
4. Which transformation is now dominant?
The coronavirus mutates when it copies itself. Scientists began to name variants, or variants, after the Greek alphabet.
In 2021, the delta mutation caused concern because, despite vaccine campaigns, it appeared to lead to more hospitalizations than its predecessor, the gamma mutation.
At the end of the same year, a new variant appeared, omikron. It spread quickly and caused a spike in infections. However, according to the WHO, the disease it caused was milder than the one caused by the delta mutation.
– Since then, we have seen omicron subversions, says the pathologist Wesley Long from Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston.
XEC, which also started to spread in the fall, is a subversion of omicron. In December, it was found to be the cause of 45 percent of the infections found in the United States.
5. What do we know about prolonged corona disease?
Millions of people in the world are fighting with the prolonged corona disease, i.e. long covid, related to the legacy of the pandemic. At the end of 2022, the number of people suffering from it in Finland was more than 21,000.
The symptoms of prolonged corona last at least three months and can last even years.
Symptoms include, for example, foggy thinking, pains and disturbances related to heart function.
For experts, the prolonged Corona has remained a mystery. It can appear even after a mild illness and age does not seem to matter.
More and more researchers have stated that in some cases, remnants of the coronavirus remain in patients’ bodies long after infection. This may provide a clue to the study of the long corona.
Studies have shown that vaccines have reduced the risk of getting sick with prolonged corona disease.
Since its cause is still unknown, developing a treatment is difficult.
Sources: AP, Reuters