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- March 10, 2025 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 103, Issue 6
- Five years ago, the world stopped turning.
- In late 2019, a virus emerged in Wuhan, China, and within weeks, it took hold across the earth. Soon, the novel coronavirus became known as SARS-CoV-2, and then more colloquially, the COVID-19 virus, as more and more people came down with the illness it caused.
- On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a pandemic.
- The WHO estimates that at least 3 million people died of COVID-19 in 2020.
- That was before vaccines became widely available and before other treatments, like antivirals and monoclonal antibodies, could be taken outside an experimental setting.
- Today, thanks largely to those interventions, COVID-19 is not the threat it once was. But chemistry still has a role to play.
- Thousands of people continue to die each month, and the collection of postviral illnesses known as long COVID has affected an estimated 409 million people or more worldwide (Nat. Med. 2024, 10.1038/s41591-024-03173-6).
- Some scientists are grappling with ways to prevent those outcomes.
- They’re developing next-generation vaccines that last longer and are easier to store, antivirals that are tailored to people with weak immune systems, and broad interventions that could stop pathogens from exploding into pandemics.
- Here C&EN looks at how the virus has transformed science and imagines what the next 5 years of COVID-19 might look like.
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