What Lessons can Be Learned From the Management of the COVID-19 Pandemic?

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2023), governments around the world implemented an unprecedented array of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2. From early 2021, these were accompanied by major population-wide COVID-19 vaccination programmes-often using novel mRNA/DNA technology, although some countries used traditional vaccines. Both the NPIs and the vaccine programmes were apparently justified by highly concerning model projections of how the pandemic could progress in their absence. Efforts to reduce the spread of misinformation during the pandemic meant that differing scientific opinions on each of these aspects inevitably received unequal weighting. In this perspective review, based on an international multi-disciplinary collaboration, we identify major problems with many aspects of these COVID-19 policies as they were implemented. We show how this resulted in adverse impacts for public health, society, and scientific progress. Therefore, we propose seven recommendations to reduce such adverse consequences in the future.

Keywords: COVID-19; COVID-19 vaccination; epidemiology; mathematical modelling; public health.

FIGURE 1

Summary of the implications of applying the Susceptible/Exposed/Infectious/Recovered framework to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Susceptible/Exposed/Infectious/Recovered model used for estimating population averages in the progression of a pandemic (a), the basic reproduction number R₀ (b), the effective reproduction number R_e (c), herd immunity (d). The Susceptible/Exposed/Infectious/Recovered model used for estimating the final size of epidemic values (e) and the projections for the first 300 days (f) in the figure were taken from the model developed for the Irish Epidemiological Modelling Advisory Group by Gleeson et al. 2022 (downloaded from https://github.com/obrienjoey/ireland_covid_modelling; Last accessed 24/05/2022) [45].

FIGURE 2

Global roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines: (A) the 50 countries where these vaccines have been rolled-out (and the data is available) with data from Our World In Data [254] (red), and approximated from webpages (listed in Supplementary Data File Excel S1) for Brazil, China, Mexico, Vietnam, Russia, Philippines, Australia and India (blue) and (B) global proportion of each vaccine by manufacturer (World, 2023).