COVID-19, Four Years Later.

On the Clinical Aftermath.

A classic Argentinean tango (Volver, sung by Carlos Gardel) says that twenty years is nothing.
Four is much less.

Figure 1. The Argentine singer Carlos Gardel, Paris, in 1923. Credit: Wikimedia (From Archivo General de la Nación).

As is well known, the pandemic of viral cause (COVID-19) officially debuted in China at the end of 2019, although it could have started before (between mid-October and mid-November). Immediately, in early 2020, it spread to different geographical areas of the planet. The causal microbe is a new RNA virus, SARS-CoV-2, of the Coronaviridae family, genus Betacoronavirus, lineage B or sarbecovirus. SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic virus with a high capacity to mutate. Within months, this little monster — previously gestated in the entrails of remote bats — devastated the planet of human primates.

COVID-19 has a category of historical pandemic.

The then-growing pandemic caused in record time an astronomical, and still unknown, number of infected people. Today, there are millions of confirmed cases (almost 773 million worldwide as of December 19, 2023, according to the WHO), many of them asymptomatic. Also, hospitals and intensive care units admitted millions of patients. Unfortunately, millions of deaths also occurred, around seven million in the world, because of acute…