AWAJI, JAPAN—The COVID-19 pandemic, as best as we can tell, took more than 20 million lives, cost $16 trillion, kept 1.6 billion children out of school, and pushed some 130 million people into poverty. And it’s not over: Figures from October 2024 showed at least 1000 people died from COVID-19 each week, 75% of them in the United States, and that’s relying only on data from the 34 countries that still report deaths to the World Health Organization (WHO). Last month, at a 4-day meeting here on preventing future pandemics, WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove ticked off those figures with exasperation. “The world I live in right now, no one wants to talk about COVID-19,” she told the gathering. “Everyone is acting as though this pandemic didn’t really happen.”

Yet 5 years after a coronavirus dubbed SARS-CoV-2 first surfaced in Wuhan, China, scientists are still intensively trying to make sense of COVID-19. “We would each have to read over 240 papers every single day to actually keep up with all of the [COVID-19] literature that’s come out” in 2024, Cherilyn Sirois, an editor at Cell, noted.

Despite the flood of insights into the behavior of the virus and how to prevent it from causing harm, many at the meeting worried the world has turned a blind eye to the lessons learned from the pandemic. “I feel this massive gravitational pull to go back to what we were doing before,” Van Kerkhove said. “There’s no way we should be going back.”