The Next Pandemic By Lynnette Harris ’88
By the time the general populous paid attention to the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2, and before businesses closed, “COVID-19” and “coronavirus” entered everyday conversations, and students in grades K-college were suddenly homeschoolers, Bart Tarbet, Brett Hurst, and other researchers around the world had already invested weeks of work trying to understand and defeat the novel coronavirus. Although war metaphors abound in the near-constant news about the world’s response to this particular coronavirus, “defeat” may not be the word to describe the researchers’ objectives. People talk about fighting or battling the virus, but SARS-CoV-2 didn’t declare war on us. The virus just is and it does what viruses do: get into the cells of a host and replicate itself. Humans may have moved on from feeling anxious and frightened to bored with the virus, but the virus doesn’t care and it’s not going away. “We have learned a lot in a very short time but we still have work to do to develop a successful treatment or vaccine,” Hurst, a research assistant professor in USU’s College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences, says. “We don’t have a miracle cure or way to prevent the spread of this virus, so we are doing the same things that we have done for months—social distancing, wearing masks, and increased hygiene procedures. Many of us have grown tired of the repetitive nature of these tasks and the limitations on our activities so we become more lax in our approach. Our social patience has worn out even though the virus is still spreading.” Tarbet, a USU research associate professor, says every pandemic or major disease outbreak has two endings—one social and one medical. He calculates that since he started graduate school in 1992, gained 12 years of experience in commercial vaccine development, and joined USU’s Institute for Antiviral Research (IAR) in 2008, SARS-CoV-2 is the fifth major emerging disease he has
Photo courtesy of USU Institute for Antiviral Research.
FALL 2020 I UTAHSTATE
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