Five years ago, the world stopped turning.
In late 2019, a virus emerged in Wuhan, China, and within weeks, it took hold across the earth: west through Europe, then across the Atlantic to Boston, where a biotech investor meeting became a superspreader event, dispersing the pathogen worldwide. Soon, the novel coronavirus became known as SARS-CoV-2, and then more colloquially, the COVID-19 virus, as more and more people came down with the illness it caused. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a pandemic.
Today, thanks largely to those interventions, COVID-19 is not the threat it once was; refrigerated trucks are no longer parked up and down city streets to store bodies that can’t fit in morgues. But chemistry still has a role to play. Thousands of people continue to die each month, and the collection of postviral illnesses known as long COVID has affected an estimated 409 million people or more worldwide (Nat. Med. 2024, DOI: 10.1038/s41591-024-03173-6).
Some scientists are grappling with ways to prevent those outcomes. They’re developing next-generation vaccines that last longer and are easier to store, antivirals that are tailored to people with weak immune systems, and broad interventions that could stop pathogens from exploding into pandemics.
Here C&EN looks at how the virus has transformed science and imagines what the next 5 years of COVID-19 might look like.