Learning from the COVID-19 Pandemic—Through Sharing and Collaboration

During the COVID-19 pandemic (which some argue is still ongoing), I led three Special Issues (SIs) that were designed to cover the talking points that arose amongst many practitioners and researchers: (1) How can we maintain our usual diagnostic services in the face of an ongoing pandemic? [1] (2) Where might the next pandemic virus come from and how might we first detect it? [2] (3) How has the pandemic changed the landscape of other viruses that affect human health? [3]. The papers that were published were broadly related to the main them of each SI, though some leeway was allowed.

In the first SI, Diagnostic Virology during the COVID-19 Pandemic—Business as Usual, my intention was to look at how ‘non-SARS-CoV-2’ testing was being maintained despite all the pandemic-related testing that was ongoing, so none of the papers focused on SARS-CoV-2 testing directly. The papers were selected to represent a general cross-section of what diagnostic laboratories normally do in non-pandemic times, and in some cases, how they maintained such services during the pandemic. These included assay evaluations [4,5], outbreak investigations [6,7,8], routine diagnostics and assay development [9,10,11], epidemiology and surveillance testing [12,13,14]. From these studies, it is clear that researchers and their laboratories were still managing to stay active and work on non-SARS-CoV-2 projects, demonstrating that they had some capacity to spare—which bodes well for any future pandemic.

The second SI, Animal and Human Respiratory Viruses—Causes of the Next Pandemic, arose from the fervent speculation around the WHO (World Health Organization) visit in early 2021 to Wuhan, China, to look for possible origins of SARS-CoV-2 [15]. The debate is still ongoing (and may never be fully resolved) about whether the virus was of natural origins, or whether it had been produced in a laboratory experiment and released by accident [16]. This SI featured papers examining potential pandemic threats from viruses originating in pigs (swine influenza) [17] and birds (avian influenza) [18,19,20], as well as the detection and surveillance of various human viruses, including RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) [21,22], influenza [23], and coronaviruses [24,25,26]. Again, whilst SARS-CoV-2 and coronaviruses were the focus of many studies, this also demonstrates that researchers were still able study the behaviour of other respiratory viruses that were still potential pandemic candidates.

Finally, in the third SI, Impact of Pandemic Measures on the Epidemiology and Seasonality of Other Viruses, as pandemic restrictions in most countries started to ease, researchers were asking the following question: how did the pandemic and its related restrictions affect the seasonality and behaviour of other respiratory viruses? This issue was perhaps most prominently highlighted with the global outbreaks of acute hepatitis in children, many of whom had been infected with adenoviruses [27]. Although none of the contributions to this SI included adenovirus, changes in the epidemiology of seasonal influenza [28,29,30], RSV [31,32,33], and other respiratory viruses [34,35,36] were investigated. Some studies compared surveillance data from before and after the main pandemic period; others examined the viral epidemiology from just before or since the onset of the pandemic. The various findings were likely related to the study population’s prior immunity to these seasonal viruses, which determined how they responded when these viruses returned after pandemic restrictions were lifted.

I would like to sincerely thank all the authors that contributed to these SIs, especially during such a busy time, when the demands on their time were likely multiple and unrelenting.