COVID-19 and Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health.

Abstract

According to the World Health Organization, 6.7 million people have died from COVID19 as of the start of 2023. These deaths are tragic with many societal ramifications. For example, more than 10 million children have lost caregivers globally through 1 May 2022 [1], while many others have suffered dramatic losses in educational attainment [2]. At times, the pandemic has overwhelmed healthcare services that have resulted in additional non-COVID death and suffering. COVID-19 has also caused sharp declines in mental health, particularly among children and adolescents [3, 4]. Mental disorders, such as depression and anxiety, are often debilitating and long-lasting, thus contributing greatly to years lived with disability. Some bright spots have also occurred, including the marked reduction in deaths due to influenza in the first year of the pandemic due to masking and social isolation and the rapid rollout of vaccines using new technologies such as mRNA vaccines, which offer great promise in battling other infectious diseases. One lesson from the pandemic is the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for addressing complex problems. We cannot control a viral pandemic with just virology. We need epidemiologists, engineers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, medical doctors, economists, statisticians, anthropologists, mathematicians and geographers (among others!) to comprehend the interconnections of human behavior, disease transmission, government interventions, global transport and trade, and the production and distribution of vaccines and treatments. Evolutionary biology is another field that has been crucial for making sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examples of evolutionary biology’s importance are many, including identifying selective pressures that lead to the rise of new variants of concern, understanding human responses to disease in relation to past evolutionary pressures from other infectious diseases, and investigating the breadth of hosts that coronaviruses infect and the ecological context of their spillover among hosts. In many cases, these evolutionary perspectives are also crucial to mitigation efforts. For example, phylogenetic approaches can reveal the origins of a new human pathogen from other species, helping guide surveillance efforts in wildlife or domesticated animals, while also revealing transmission pathways among human populations. In the early months of the pandemic, for example, many of us spent hours on NextStrain (https:// nextstrain.org/) examining the most up-to-date phylogenies of SARS-CoV-2 to help make sense of its global movement. We can see the breadth of these evolutionary perspectives on COVID-19 in the pages of Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health (EMPH). So far, EMPH has published 24 scientific articles EDITORIAL BY INVITATION ONLY