Table 2.

Unique aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic

(1) A high rate of infectivity before manifestation of clinical disease (Alene et al. 2021)

(2) An unusual high pulmonary morbidity (Johnson et al. 2020)

(3) A broad range of age-associated diseasea

(4) A development in some cases of multisystemic manifestations including a an inflammatory state in children (MIS-C) (Santos et al. 2022)

(5) A tendency in some infected persons to evolve into a chronic disease (often referred to, first by the British as “long COVID”) (Akbarialiabad et al. 2021)

(6) A high influence of social media attendant with both positive and negative aspects; (Venega-Vera et al. 2020)

(7) Past issues related to travel and border restrictionsb (Le et al. 2022) (Moodley et al. 2022)

(8) A history of employment restrictions associated with infected personnel including the undefined impact of stay-at-home or work-from-home policies. (Howe et al. 2021)

^aShared with the somewhat more bimodal respiratory syncytial virus) (“COVID-19 Stats: COVID-19 Incidence,* by Age Group† — United States, March 1–November 14, 2020§” 2021)

^bIronically bans were set up after South Africa released Omicron variant genome data. (Le et al. 2022)