10 Surprising Things We've Learned About the Coronavirus

By:

Michelle Crouch,

Remember wearing gloves and wiping down groceries to stay safe from the coronavirus? Thinking that COVID-19 would be no worse than a case of the flu? Or believing the pandemic would be gone

by summer?

A year after the U.S. declared a national emergency on March 13, 2020, we now know that many of our early assumptions about the new coronavirus that rapidly swept the globe were wrong.

Through the long months of the pandemic, the virus constantly found new ways to surprise us. “A day has not gone by [during the pandemic] where I haven't had some sort of ‘Oh my!’ moment,”

says David Aronoff, M.D., director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, Aronoff says, has been the sheer size and scale of the devastation. In one year, the coronavirus infected 117 million people worldwide and killed nearly 2.6

million — over 525,000 of them in the U.S.

"People warned us that something like this could happen,” Aronoff says, “but it's different to see it happen and to see the power of a microscopic critter to extract this much panic, fear,

anxiety and human suffering on a global level.”

Here are 10 things we've learned since the onset of the pandemic that have surprised us the most about the coronavirus.

At the beginning of the pandemic, most medical experts thought the coronavirus spread through large respiratory droplets that traveled only a short distance through the air, or through

intermediate objects that had been touched by an infected person. We were told to wash our hands frequently and disinfect surfaces.

But as the pandemic went on, “we learned a ton about just how important the air was for spreading this disease,” Aronoff says.

Studies emerged that showed the virus was in tiny particles suspended in the air, and that people got infected after being in the same room as someone. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention (CDC) now says smaller viral droplets and particles “can remain suspended for many minutes to hours and travel far from the source on air currents.” Airborne transmission is

especially likely in enclosed spaces with poor ventilation, and when infected individuals are shouting, singing or exercising, the CDC says. That realization helped shift health guidance to

focus on mask wearing and social distancing.

Because the coronavirus and the seasonal flu are both respiratory viruses with similar symptoms, many experts early in the pandemic compared the two. However, we now know that the

coronavirus is significantly more infectious than the flu, says Sten Vermund, M.D., an infectious disease epidemiologist and dean of the Yale School of Public Health.

A person with seasonal flu infects on average 1.28 additional people, studies show, while a person with COVID-19 infects two to three. It may not sound like a big difference, but it's why

the flu was almost nonexistent this winter as Americans practiced mask-wearing and social distancing while the coronavirus continued to spread. It's also the reason why one sick person at an

indoor choir practice or hockey game is able to infect so many.

In addition to being more contagious, the coronavirus is also more deadly than the flu. A study published Feb. 10, 2021, in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found the risk of death

from COVID-19 is more than triple that from seasonal flu.