May 2021, Columbia University, New York
The United States initially failed to control the pandemic; 1.9 million cases were reported in 2020, compared with 294,999 in Europe, 12,300 in Canada, 10,300 in Australia and 21.499 in Japan. Overall, we rank 19th in public health infrastructure and economic resilience.
The population, unfortunately, derides science as a matter of principle and is more and more distrustful of vaccines. We discussed the unique features of the response to the covid 19 virus: men were particularly vulnerable and had more severe disease and higher mortality than women. as were those with other illnesses. We considered the roles of the sex-dependent hormones, different copy numbers of immune response X-linked genes and the presence of disease-susceptible genes in the two sexes. The mysterious long-term effects of the virus were evident in a subset of the population and we continue to be powerless to mitigate them. Finally, we reviewed the NIH strategic plan for COVID 19 research, which concentrated on the interaction between the virus proteins and the host, the mechanisms of infection and the susceptibility of different systems to infection, identification of markers for outcomes, the development of preclinical models of infection, and the; dynamics of transmission at the population level.