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APMIS pandemic editorial

Looking back through the last 12 months, the scientific press, lay media, and the worldwide political agenda have been dominated by the pandemic COVID-19 cause by SARS-CoV-2. We have rarely seen an infectious organism causing so much ravage, at least in industrialized countries, with huge impact on world economy and social life. The scientific and medical community have worked extremely hard to explore and understand COVID-19; the best examples are introduction of better treatment regimens and development of vaccines faster than ever before. However, COVID-19 has also been a pandemic ruled by the news media and politicians not always on par with scientific knowledge-based decision. Scientific “experts” have bloomed during the pandemic all eager to explain how they think the COVID-19 behaves and expands etc., experimental virologist and bacteriologists becoming epidemiologist and mathematicians and basic epidemiologist without clinical insight having an opinion on clinical decisions, politicians making decisions based on gut feelings and fear rather than clinical and scientifically guidance. Could the world have tackled COVID-19, no one knows, yet. In hindsight, many things could have been done differently but a true and clear picture on how we as a scientific community, the media, and the politicians have dealt with the situation will not be available for some time. What is important is not to necessarily point fingers but use all the evidence and knowledge created and developed during COVID-19 to prepare the world for the next pandemic. In addition, it would suit the politicians in the Western World if they dealt with the pandemics and suffering in third world countries as they did in their own countries during COVID-19. No one doubts COVID-19 is special, and what makes it extremely special is that it has captured the written press and the world politicians like never before. Bottom line is that the lack of preparedness of the Western Word for COVID-19 has been exposed. Future investment in research and health care should take into account that the next disease X may fulfill the last criteria—high mortality. In this special issue, we have collected manuscripts describing past pandemics’ influence on the world as well as scientific descriptions on how different countries have dealt with the pandemic. We have collected articles from epidemiologist and mathematicians describing their work on predicting and explain the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Lastly, we have a few articles on methods to detect the virus and how countries have used patient databases for diagnostic purposes. As of writing, other infectious organisms kill even more humans every year, an example is acute pneumonia which kills close to a million children under 5, and the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis are killing close to two million people every year. We sincerely thank all authors of this special issue on Pandemics Past, Present, and Future for their contributions. We hope you will enjoy the selected articles