We must revisit the covid-19 pandemic to prepare for future outbreaks

Yes, it really has been five years. On 7 January 2020, we published an article with the headline “Doctors scramble to identify mysterious illness emerging in China”. By then, at least 59 people had been infected with what we now know to be SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind covid-19. The rest is – well, has now become – history.

Of course, you know all of that: you lived through it. So why are we publishing a special report on covid-19 now? For many, the height of the pandemic was an incredibly painful and difficult time (see “How the covid-19 pandemic distorted our experience of time”…