Washington Post Experts are worried that despite the hard-won lessons of covid, we are not fully prepared for the next pandemic. Outbreaks of new types of infections and, yes, even pandemics are becoming increasingly likely, and we need to prepare for not only the next one but also its long-lasting physical and mental effects, experts said. “The reality is that pandemics are going to hit. They’re going to hit again,” said Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis who researches long covid. “It’s not a matter of if. It is a matter of when.”
In the pastfive years, covid has caused serious amounts of chronic illness and disability. The SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to infect people every day, and an estimated 20 million Americans are still dealing withthe many symptoms of long covid.