OPINION: What have we learned in 5 years with COVID-19?

This editorial was published in The Columbian of Vancouver, Wash.

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Five years ago this week, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic, marking a seminal moment in the spread of the novel virus.

In Washington, a state of emergency had been declared Feb. 29; a stay-at-home order was not issued until March 23. But the second week of March in 2020, stands as a demarcation point in an outbreak that has had a broad impact on American society and American politics.

Rehashing decisions that were made at the time is pointless; government and health officials had never dealt with anything the scope of coronavirus, and they were constantly updating decisions based on new information. Over the past five years, the previously unknown virus has been blamed for more than 1.1 million deaths in the United States — including 17,000 in Washington.

But there are lessons to be learned about the importance of preparation and the need for investment in public health. An ounce of prevention, they say, is worth a pound of cure.

That is particularly important with the return of Donald Trump to the White House. During his first term, as COVID-19 began to spread across the globe from its origins in China, Trump initially chastised Democrats, saying “This is their new hoax.” He frequently insisted that coronavirus was under control in the United States. He asked about the possibility of injecting disinfectants to kill the virus.

The lackadaisical federal response was predictable. In early 2018, two years before the pandemic, the Trump administration called for federal agencies to leave 39 of the 49 low-income countries where they were working to train disease detectives and build emergency operations centers. As Julia Belluz of Vox.com surmised at the time, “While it’s true that America has long been underprepared for a pandemic, the risks right now appear to be especially high.”

Later, Trump fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, leaving confusion as to how the nation would respond to an outbreak like the one it soon faced.

All of that is particularly harrowing as a new Trump administration engages in mass firings of federal workers. Ostensibly designed to trim the fat from federal government, the indiscriminate cuts ignore the lesson that should have been learned from the COVID-19 outbreak — sometimes government is vitally important.

But the story of Trump and COVID-19 does not end there. The first Trump administration launched Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to develop a vaccine. By the end of the year, inoculations were being prepared for mass release.

The development of a vaccine was perhaps the signature accomplishment of the first Trump administration. The Commonwealth Fund, a health policy research group, estimates that vaccines prevented more than 3 million COVID-19 deaths in the United States from December 2020 to November 2022.

But rather than embrace that success, Trump has selected noted vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead Health and Human Services, and budget cuts have been announced for health organizations. Anti-vax sentiments have been afforded a prominent place in the administration, even as the H5N1 bird flu threatens to grow into a pandemic.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 remains a persistent — if not prominent — aspect of American life. From October 2024 through February 2025, 11 deaths in Clark County were attributed to the virus.

All of which leads to the most pertinent question as we look back on the past five years: Have we learned anything?

TNS