2 years into the pandemic, burning questions remain about COVID-19 — and how we fight it
CBC
In early 2020, as Dr. Samira Mubareka was following global updates on a strange new virus first reported in China, people with pneumonia-like symptoms started showing up in her hospital in Toronto.
One of the patients that came to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre was a man who'd travelled back from Wuhan. He was quite sick — more so than others who'd proven to be false alarms, Mubareka thought.
Inside Sunnybrook — a stately, sprawling hospital campus in one of Toronto's toniest neighbourhoods — a newly developed diagnostic test confirmed what she and others suspected: the man had Canada's first official case of what's now known as COVID-19.
"The fact that it came as early as January, it lit a fire," Mubareka later recalled.
While dressed in full protective gear, the microbiologist and infectious diseases specialist took samples from the patient's isolation room. Her team was then able to culture the virus from several specimens inside a Level 3 containment facility — just one piece of the global effort to better understand SARS-CoV-2.
Not long after, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. One day later, Mubareka's team officially announced they'd isolated the virus behind it, joining other global scientists in offering hope that the world would be able to develop vaccines and treatments.
"Since then, we've just been following the virus around, whether it's been variants of concern that have emerged in fairly rapid sequence, and finally following it into animals," Mubareka said.
Two years into a pandemic that's still raging around much of the globe, scientists like her are striving to unpack what makes this mysterious pathogen tick. Leading vaccines have proven remarkably effective at keeping severe disease at bay, yet SARS-CoV-2 remains a formidable foe — a mutating shapeshifter that's evading our defences and capable of spreading at rapid rates rarely seen among other viruses.
Despite a surge in research, leading Canadian virologists and front-line physicians say burning questions remain over how the coronavirus operates and where this pandemic is heading.
Why are certain people so susceptible to infection, or serious illness? How will this virus continue to evolve? Which vaccines, drugs and public health strategies will protect our population from future variants? And where will SARS-CoV-2 show up next?
"There are just so many things we have to stay on top of," Mubareka said.
Two years' worth of research into SARS-CoV-2 has painted an alarming picture of its uncanny ability to impact whole-body health. Studies have linked infections to a host of multi-organ issues, impacting everything from the brain to the gut to the heart, along with the entire circulatory system that pumps blood through your body.
Amid all the dire possible impacts, questions remain over why some people wind up with barely a sniffle, while others are ravaged by COVID-19.
Dr. Srinivas Murthy, a researcher on childhood infections and an associate professor in the University of British Columbia's faculty of medicine, said that aside from whether someone is vaccinated or not, being elderly remains the clearest predictor of someone's potential for severe COVID.