At the start of 2025, the symptoms of Covid-19 are still those linked to the circulation of the Omicron variant (and its sub-lineages), the majority in the world. The most commonly observed are fatigue, headache, fever, cough and runny nose. The new strains may be less dangerous than those from five years ago, but they can be deadly, public health officials around the world are warning. All it took was to see masks flourish again in public places.
Dr Abderrahmane Cherfouh *
Five years ago, in January 2020, Covid-19 invaded the world and turned the lives of all humanity upside down. The danger came from the infinitely small and it caused enormous damage: more than 20 million deaths according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Five years later, this pandemic has not yet revealed all its secrets. Some questions still remain unanswered.
For researchers and scientists, the coronavirus was an accident of nature, which is not the opinion of conspiracy theorists who claim that it is the result of deliberate and planned human manipulation, without bringing the least evidence.
Initially, there was an animal vector, probably the pangolin, which infected a person in a public market at a location near a very high security biology laboratory in Wuhan, China. This person will in turn contaminate tens, thousands and millions of others… Soon, all of humanity will be affected, the virus having found fertile ground for its rapid spread, through successive contaminations, and a speed that had become uncontrollable.
Life on earth has frozen
The pandemic will take advantage of ignorance, inexperience, unconsciousness, negligence, as well as the great mobility of people and their gatherings (planes, boats, trains, buses, stadiums, cinemas, meetings, markets, concerts, parties, etc.) to spread at lightning speed. With the density of populations helping, from villages to towns, from regions to territories, from countries to continents, the pandemic has taken off and spread to all regions of the world, even the most remote and isolated.
With the onset of the pandemic, life on earth froze, waiting for the miracle to happen. And before the development of the first vaccines, it took a year of confinement, social distancing, mask wearing, feverish waiting and sacrifices. It was, let us remember, a real global nightmare.
To stem this terrible pandemic which threatened to take everything away, it was necessary to find a vaccine capable of overcoming it as quickly as possible. Dozens of laboratories around the world have embarked on a race against time to develop the said vaccine. And in just one year, the miracle happened. To achieve this, Pfizer and Moderna used a new technology, messenger RNA. Years of prior research – including Nobel Prize-winning discoveries – were essential to making this new technology work.
The vaccines developed have been very useful and have proven their effectiveness, despite the skepticism displayed by some. They have, in any case, succeeded in limiting the spread of the pandemic, preventing its serious forms and avoiding many hospitalizations and deaths.
Furthermore, in five years, at least five variants of the coronavirus have emerged and have been classified as worrying by the WHO: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Omicron and are the subject of very increased surveillance because they are more contagious, resistant to vaccination and sometimes associated with an increased risk of serious illness.
Questions still unanswered
In this context, two questions still torment the minds of researchers and to which we have not been able to answer scientifically.
1- Why has Covid-19 spared children? Several hypotheses have been put forward on this subject but which are not yet supported by serious studies and irrefutable evidence.
2- Why did the catastrophe predicted in African countries not take place? Given the extreme poverty plaguing African countries, the few resources these countries have and their failing and poorly prepared health systems, experts from all sides have warned of a massacre in Africa with tens of millions of deaths. It was nothing of the sort. Africa was the least affected continent. And it is in developed countries, more organized and better equipped, that the virus has wreaked the most havoc. How to explain this paradox?
At a time when the threat of a possible return of the pandemic with mutating viruses is once again being raised and when masks are making a comeback in public places all over the world, these questions are coming back to the heart of the news. The only consolation: today, we are better prepared and better equipped to face any eventuality.
* Doctor.
