This past week marked another milestone in COVID-19.
It was only a year ago that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic. An unusual form of pneumonia, which started in Wuhan, China, had reached enough countries and was spreading rapidly enough to cause concern. A new severe acute respiratory syndrome or SARS coronavirus was threatening lives.
The first case reported by Health Canada was on January 25, 2020, in a traveler from China. By February 20, we had our first confirmed case in a traveler from Iran and not related to travel in China. By February 26, Health Canada was reporting a total of 12 cases across the country.
On March 9, Canada had a total of 77 cases and its first fatality related to the disease. I was living in New Zealand at the time and didn’t see much Canadian news but the impression I got from what I did see wasn’t a sense of panic or a realization of what was to follow.
By March 11, WHO reported 126,000 cases worldwide and by March 15, Canada was experiencing 89 new cases per day. But it took another nine days before Health Canada determined community transmission was occurring in Canada. Our case total was 2,792 that day.
Roughly one year later, on March 13, 2021, Worldometer recorded 119,921,722 cases and 2,655,841 deaths worldwide. And in Canada, there were 905,476 cases with 22,424 deaths. A total of 22,424 Canadians have died from the disease in just over one year.
To put that another way, 1 in every 41 people in the country have contracted the disease. Chances are if you have 40 friends, you know someone who has had COVID-19.
To say this past year has been a bad year or rough is an understatement.
But it hasn’t been all bad. There are some good things that have come out of the pandemic. For example, a whole lot of people have re-discovered the fine art of making bread!
That is a little facetious. But we are learning to do things ourselves again. Whether it is a haircut, cooking classes, art projects, or just engaging with our families in a vicious game of Scrabble, we have had to change our habits.
How many of these activities will last beyond the pandemic? Not many. But some might. Family sing-alongs, game nights, walks with friends, and cooking together might be something we can hold onto after all of the restrictions are lifted. Or maybe we will all just go back to staring at our smartphones.
We have also learned this year how to develop vaccines rapidly.
For decades, vaccine research has been a backburner item. As one of my colleagues put it, “There’s no money in it.” It certainly wasn’t a priority for the pharmaceutical industry. The invested costs were not compensated by the revenue vaccines could generate.
All of that changed last January 13. The first genome of the coronavirus was made publicly available and three days later, Moderna announced its plans to develop and test a messenger RNA (mRNA) based vaccine for the disease.
It was a first-of-its-kind idea and treatment. A novel approach. The idea is to give some of our cells the instructions for making the spike proteins, which encase the virus and allow it to attack cells.
The cells would dutifully follow the instructions to make the spike proteins, which would be expressed on their outer membrane. The body’s immune system would recognize the protein as foreign and attack the cells.
And having learned to attack cells with those particular spike proteins, the immune system would now be able to wipe out any viruses entering the body.
By March 18, some 65 days later, Moderna was able to announce preliminary data from their Phase 1 trial showing the mRNA vaccine is both safe and effective. And although it took until November 16 before the company could announce their Phase 3 trial showed a 94.5 per cent efficacy against COVOD-19, this was still an amazing and fast process. Science worked the way it is supposed to.
AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, and other companies have developed their own vaccines and we are now well on our way to inoculating the planet.
One of the legacies of this pandemic will be an apparatus capable of rapid response to novel viruses and other forms of disease. While that knowledge does not compensate for all of the lives lost, it is at least a step in the right direction. We will be better equipped going forward which may be necessary if the “variants of concern” keep spreading rapidly.
But on balance, as we move through the month of March and realize we have all been in isolation for a year, it has been a very bad year for just about everyone.
