When the daily demands of pandemic management diminish, researchers will want to study the damage caused by Covid-19 and assess how health systems and policymakers responded to the scourge.
Exercise will help prepare you for the next viral attack. But a year after the first American patient was hospitalized with Covid-19, the data needed to answer basic questions about the spread of the virus is – in the words of some experts – a mess.
The evidence has been unequal between states and communities. The number of cases, which lack asymptomatic and mild infections, is too low. And the death measures are believed to be incomplete.
According to some estimates, for every documented case of Covid-19, there are at least two undetected infections and the unusually high number of deaths that occurred last year suggests that the virus could have killed more people than the data recorded.
By the end of 2020, nearly 346,000 deaths in the United States had been attributed to Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 450,000 excess deaths occurred that year.