Some choice quotes:

“My first reaction was, “Omigod, is this early Alzheimer’s?” But by talking to my colleagues, I began to realize, of course, this is likely part of that composite long COVID. After about a month, the memory loss seemed to go away, but the fatigue persisted. There were times I would walk across our condo and just be exhausted. It really hasn’t been until about the last month and a half that I’ve really started to feel as if I’m fully back.”

“I think we’re clearly on the backside of what I would call the pandemic surges. I don’t think we’re going to ever go back to 2020, 2021 or 2022. But at the same time, one of the challenges we have is these variants keep changing. And what these changing variants might do and how they might do it is something we haven’t anticipated yet.”

“Also, we’re actually seeing a population that, in many cases, is becoming less immune, not more. Because as time goes on, we know that the duration of protection from both vaccine and previous infection wanes.”

“Over the next several months, we’re about to see the public health system in this country systematically dismantled. I’ve never seen anything like this in my 48 years in the business — the amount of clawback that has happened with resources and funds. We’re going to see major layoffs in public health agencies all across the country at federal, state and local levels. We’re going to see research scaled back substantially on infectious diseases.”

“There is nothing in the biological cookbook that says eventually we’re not going to see a coronavirus that is as infectious as SARS-CoV-2 and kills at the same rate as MERS and SARS.”