On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced a newly discovered coronavirus had escalated into an international emergency. COVID-19 was officially a pandemic.
The worldwide outbreak took millions of lives and upended the rest.
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo held daily briefings as New York City quickly became an epicenter for the respiratory virus. On March 20, Cuomo took drastic action: a statewide shutdown of all non-essential business.
He said it was a necessary step to save the health care system from total breakdown.
“It's more than double the capacity of the hospital system," Cuomo said at his March 20 news briefing. "It's more than triple the capacity of the ICU system…The only option available to us is to reduce the spread.”
Five years later, doctors who were on the frontlines said the pandemic changed the face of public health while exposing serious challenges in medicine and science. Now, they said it’s time to take stock of COVID-19's public health lessons before the next pandemic hits.
"Science is cooperative, not competitive," said Dr. Sharon Nachman, Chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Stony Brook Children's Hospital and Director of the Office of Clinical Trials at Stony Brook Medicine.
That maxim was center-stage for Nachman, who helped develop and test the first COVID-19 vaccines.
“Everyone who was doing science for many different reasons stopped their own research projects and jumped in to help develop a vaccine,” Nachman said.
The all-hands-on-deck approach was instrumental in saving lives, and Nachman said that cooperation was a credit to the medical community’s ability to confront diseases.
"It was pretty much the effort of, 'We need a vaccine and we need it now,'" Nachman said. "It really pushed people who in the past may not have worked so fast and so well together to do it fast and well.”
An area that needs improvement is the way health care experts communicate vital medical information to the public. Nachman said doctors have to respond quickly in a fast-moving pandemic, which means medical advice for staying healthy can change just as fast.
“Opinions changed because we had new data," Nachman said, but some communities had trouble adapting to the rapid adjustments in best practices. "They wanted to say, ‘Last week you said this, and this week you're saying that, so I don't believe you for anything.'"
That credibility gap needs fixing.
“Science evolves, and science understanding evolves," said Dr. Susan Donelan, Medical Director of Healthcare Epidemiology at Stony Brook Medicine. "It's dynamic. It's not a static process.”
Donelan said that makes public health more challenging than ever — coupled with the information overload of the 21st century.
“The truth is, is that whatever you believe — because of the robustness of the World Wide Web — you can find a forum, you can find an expert, you can find a talking head, you can find a chat room, you can find something that will support your beliefs," Donelan said, creating a "huge challenge" for public health experts who try to educate the public in the future.
More people grew skeptical of vaccines during COVID-19. They still are.
For example, a safe and effective measles vaccine has existed for decades, yet cases are increasing around the country right now, largely in unvaccinated communities.
“There are places in the world that would love to have those vaccines, but the first world country problem is that we have an abundance of opportunity to vaccinate, and yet we have people who decline," Donelan said. "While it [vaccine hesitancy] existed well before the pandemic and will exist well after, it is one of the unfortunate amplifications that has reverberated. That's going to reverberate into the future.”
While the pandemic uncovered problems in public health communication, Donelan and Nachman said it also spawned a positive innovation in medicine: telehealth.
They said virtual doctor visits make healthcare more accessible for homebound patients and those in rural areas and make it easier to include language interpreters.
“We also have the ability to have an interpreter on and that became especially critical for our populations all over Long Island, that English was not their primary language," Nachman said. "In the past, you had to worry.”
