It has been five years since health officials in China identified Coronavirus as the cause of the outbreak which led to the death of millions.


Local health officials said they have learned a lot during the course of the pandemic and are still gathering information.

Dr. Howard Nadworny, an Infectious Disease Specialist Consultant through AHN Saint Vincent said, "Five years, it seems like a long time. I will tell you, the first two years were awful. I never want to go through those again."


Dr. Nadworny has studied a lot of infectious diseases, but said nothing could compare to the Covid-19 pandemic As Dr. Nadworny explained, "There are no other viruses that I am aware of that significantly mutates over three months that they cause outbreaks every three to four months and that's something we saw with Covid."


He believes responding fast was the best way to try to handle the pandemic. "If you don't respond aggressively, especially with tracking it and measuring, finding how you can mitigate the spread, you will find major risk of having another major outbreak", said Dr. Nadworny.


The vaccine rollout also contributed to the slowing of the spread. "Two companies were able to develop two different vaccines that quickly and find that they were as highly effectively as they were was really remarkable", said Dr. Nadworny.


He said how people responded was the best lesson learned and will be helpful in future health emergencies, "If you overreact, which is how many people think we responded, you will find less damage and less injury to the economy, than if you wait to see if it's going to go away on its own. I think that's still the take home lesson, I'm not sure if we have learned it and my fear is that we are going to rediscover it in the next several years."


Dr. Nadworny said that just because people may not hear about the pandemic all the time doesn't mean it's gone forever, "We are not done with Covid because Covid is not done with us."

Dr. Nadworny also said that even if people don't hear about Covid all the time, it's still very present. He said they treat patients every day for the virus at the hospitals and over the course of five years, he can only recall one week with no Covid-19 patients.