The biggest lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps that a technological fix (the vaccine) can be more effective than one relying on changing behaviors.
While this may seem obvious now, that wasn’t the case when the pandemic started. Common sense suggested that simple containment measures like wearing masks and social distancing are easier to implement than developing, testing and distributing a vaccine based on untested technology. People based their assumptions of how long vaccine development would take on historical precedent. This also turned out to be wrong. Before COVID, it took many years to develop vaccines. The first effective shots were available nine months after COVID became a pandemic. It was biotechnology’s greatest triumph, and one that still isn’t adequately celebrated. It’s hard to tell how many lives they saved compared to the counterfactual (no vaccines), but one conservative estimate is that they prevented millions of infections and 120,000 deaths in the United States in the first six months after their rollout. Other estimates are a lot higher.
While vaccine development was a success, other policy responses to the pandemic ranged from suboptimal to disastrous. This is also surprising: How could the same biomedical community, and sometimes the very same people, be so competent in developing vaccines, but so incompetent in formulating an optimal policy response? And more importantly, what are the lessons that can be drawn to prepare us for the next pandemic?
It’s hard to answer this question, because until now, there is no single, authoritative report on what worked and what didn’t. There has been no bipartisan congressional commission like after 9/11, and if there were, I doubt it would be insightful, given how much perceptions of COVID-19 are still colored by political biases. To my knowledge, there has only been one dispassionate account of the events from a historian’s perspective. These days, the pandemic rarely gets mentioned on blogs or in social media. There have been no bestsellers or noteworthy movies based on the pandemic.
It’s probably just too early.
