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Two years ago, on Jan. 5, 2020, The Dallas Morning News published its first article about a mysterious lung infection that sickened 44 people in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
It was tucked away in the A section of Sunday’s print edition. The story, written by Jason Gale of Bloomberg News, ran on Page 15A with the headline “Mystery infection tracked in China.”
The virus – what we now know to be the novel coronavirus – felt like a distant threat to many in early January 2020.
Public health experts, however, recognized the dangerous potential of the pneumonia-like disease. By Jan. 24, 2020, China had locked down three cities and U.S. airports began screening passengers for signs of the virus.
By March of that year, life as we knew it was upended as schools and workplaces closed.
In the past two years, more than 5.4 million people have died from COVID-19 – 826,000 of them in the U.S., according to data from The New York Times. More than 292 million people have tested positive worldwide, a number that’s climbing as the highly-contagious omicron variant continues to spread at an unprecedented rate.
“We were hearing about what was going on in China and we were extremely concerned,” recalled Dr. Philip Huang, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services. “What we’ve learned throughout this is that it’s hard to predict what’s going to happen.”
North Texas hospitals are weathering yet another wave of COVID-19, the peak of which has yet to be reached. “If we compare it to some of the other countries, it’s probably going to be at least another two weeks of increasing cases,” Huang said.
More than 2,500 North Texans are currently hospitalized for COVID-19, according to the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council. And while hospitalizations from this surge have yet to reach the highs seen in previous surges, public health experts say this peak could be more detrimental to an already exhausted health care system.
“In the previous surge with delta, health care workers were staying healthy,” said Steve Love, president and CEO of the DFW Hospital Council. “Now, many are out. It doesn’t mean they’re hospitalized, but they do have to isolate [themselves].”
Health care workers are tired. Massive surges of COVID-19 in January and September of 2020 have left frontline workers burned out. Providers are leaving the field at alarming rates, leaving hospitals scrambling and remaining staff overburdened by the number of COVID-19 patients entering emergency departments.
Schools are still navigating if, when and how to hold in-person learning. Dallas ISD announced it will extend its mask mandate through spring break because of recent case rates, when it had previously planned to end its mask requirement in mid-January.
Businesses are also changing return-to-work plans. Some of the country’s largest banks, for instance, are again delaying when employees should return to the office amid the omicron-fueled case surge.
Though seemingly few and far between, some positive developments have come out of the pandemic.
The health care and science communities rallied together to produce vaccines and treatments at never-before-seen rates.
By the end of 2020, vaccines were being rolled out to essential workers and at-risk populations. Now, children as young as 5 in the U.S. can receive the Pfizer vaccine, and anyone 12 and older can get a Pfizer vaccine booster.
A number of treatments for COVID-19 patients have also been developed, including two different easy-to-use pills that were given emergency use authorization in December.
Experts don’t know exactly when the coronavirus will cease to disrupt our lives, or whether we will ever return to life as we knew it before the pandemic.
“There are so many things that have changed during the course of what we’re dealing with,” Huang said. “We’ve learned to expect the unexpected.”