VIDEO: Physicians ‘very surprised’ by emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants

CHICAGO — Although questions remain regarding SARS-CoV-2, including the number of boosters a person will eventually require and how to manage patients with long COVID, physicians have learned a lot about the virus.

During the ACP Internal Medicine Meeting, Roy M. Gulick, MD, MPH, Rochelle Belfer Professor in Medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, discussed six important lessons that physicians learned during the pandemic. One lesson, he said, is that coronaviruses can mutate.

“Prior to this pandemic, we thought that coronaviruses really didn’t have a tendency to mutate,” Gulick told Healio. “But we’ve been very surprised by the emergence of variants over time.”

Another important lesson is that the vaccine development process can be “truncated in an efficient way,” Gulick said.

In this video, Gulick discusses how physicians’ knowledge of viruses and vaccine development have evolved over the past 2 years.

Reference:

Gulick RM. COVID-19: Lesson learned. Presented at: ACP Internal Medicine Meeting; April 28-30, 2022; Chicago.