From Poliomyelitis to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Reflections by a Virologist

Abstract

Never before have the media focused on a single infectious disease as they have in the case of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic that started to spread globally from China at the end of 2019. The consequences of the pandemic on health, economics, and the societal conditions of isolated individuals have been discussed from a range of different perspectives. Virologists are expected to be capable of providing immediate answers to many different kinds of questions—how and under what conditions is an individual infectious, what are the relative roles of the different arms of the immune system, do reinfections occur, when will a vaccine preventing infection with the virus become available, what are the possibilities of developing antiviral drugs capable of interfering with the disease, and so on. In many cases there are no immediate answers, since virologists globally are still in the middle of researching the particular problem in the focus of interest. The only proper answer to demanding questions of this kind should be “Welcome to the workshop of virologists.” However, what needs to be emphasized is that the tools available to understand the details of the interaction of a particular virus and the various organs in an infected human host have changed dramatically during the somewhat more than a hundred years of studies of viruses.