This story is a part of our Ask a Professor series, in which Georgetown faculty members break down complex issues and use their research to inform trending conversations, research breakthroughs and critical global events shaping our world.
Five years ago this month, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. In the years since, the U.S. grappled with massive grief and loss. More than 1 million Americans died, and more than 7 million people passed away around the world.
Five years later, scientists are discovering the impacts of COVID-19 on the way we eat, learn, work, travel, socialize. And while the impact has been enormous, Professor Rebecca Katz knows that most people want to move on.
“I am the least popular person walking into a room,” Katz said. “I am okay with that. Nobody wants to talk about the pandemic anymore.”
Rebecca Katz is a professor and director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center.
Katz is the director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security and teaches courses on global health diplomacy, global health security, and emerging infectious diseases, including a 2022 class onHow To End a Pandemic. In her work, she’s uncovered parallels between society’s reaction five years after the 1918 Spanish Flu and Americans’ after COVID-19 — as part of a cycle of “panic to neglect,” she says.
Katz, who was a senior advisor to the Department of State on the global COVID-19 response in 2021 and recently co-authored a book on responding to outbreaks, has never stopped working on pandemic preparedness and response and examining governance of public health emergencies.
We met with Katz to find out why we don’t want to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic, how it has affected Americans five years later, and what we still don’t know about the virus.
Ask a Professor: Rebecca Katz on Responding to the Pandemic
On March 14, Rebecca Katz spoke on a panel with Dr. Anthony Fauci (right) and Joel Hellman (left), dean of the School of Foreign Service, about the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic at Georgetown Library. Photo by Bailey Payne.
How would you describe the impact COVID-19 has had on Americans five years later?
Everybody’s going to describe impact differently. But first and foremost, a lot of people died. Minimum a million in the US, probably five times that. You think about the excess mortality and the people who died from cancer because they never got treated. At the very core, we have huge swaths of our society who are gone now because of this.
We have a quiet population that is continuing to live with long COVID. We also continue to see this virus circulating. It’s not the same kind of risk to the general public as it was in 2020, but there are still hospitalizations every week. Across society, there is so much that has been impacted, from how we work from home to how we think about trust in government.
Are there connections between the way society reacted five years after the 1918 Spanish Flu and our response after COVID-19?
In our field, we always talk about the cycle of panic to neglect in outbreaks. The bigger the outbreak, the bigger the peak of panic, and then the bigger the fall into neglect. A couple of years back, Emily Mendenhall and I supervised students who did a project on the 100-year anniversary of 1918 and how Georgetown was impacted. It was always surprising to me that this generation-defining event disappeared from all public accounts and culture by 1922. Approximately fifty million people in the world died. It wasn’t in literature; it wasn’t in movies.
I never quite got it until this time around, where, again, the more COVID-19 impacted everyone’s lives, the more people didn’t want to deal with it anymore in their day-to-day lives. It’s not where people mentally want to be.
Are there differences in Americans’ reactions to the two pandemics?
On the public health and medical side, we have seen a tremendous amount of innovation. This is what happens when every smart person in the world is singly focused on trying to get out of their basement and reopen society. mRNA vaccines. Innovations in disease surveillance, like wastewater surveillance. There were a lot of advancements on the design of medical countermeasures and point-of-care diagnostics.
There are a lot of challenges that have come from the pandemic, though. Public health is not currently a celebrated profession. Our relationship with partners around the world is strained and it is difficult to collaborate on public health emergencies. And there is a legacy of inequity from the pandemic response that will take a long time to address.
What do we still not know about COVID-19?
How do you fight mis- and disinformation effectively — and “by fight” — even using those terms, it’s the wrong word. You don’t want to fight. You want to bring everybody together and improve public literacy and help people understand public health information. This is a huge challenge that will need to be addressed.
What does it mean that COVID-19 is now endemic?
COVID-19 is now a virus that we live with. It’s here. It is no longer a significant threat to the general public, but it continues to be something that vulnerable populations will want to protect themselves against.
What are you working on now in relation to infectious diseases?
We are continuing to train our students in this field and trying to contribute to the scholarship and the policy on pandemic preparedness and response to public health emergencies.
One of our projects has been documenting the federal laws and regulations associated with how to address a large-scale public health emergency. We have also been curating all the laws and policies around the world related to emerging infectious diseases, in order to figure out what works and what doesn’t work.
