{"id":10389,"date":"2022-03-22T17:12:51","date_gmt":"2022-03-22T21:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/?p=10389"},"modified":"2022-03-23T09:54:14","modified_gmt":"2022-03-23T13:54:14","slug":"what-have-we-learned-from-the-pandemic-so-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nejm.org\/hiv-id-observations\/index.php\/what-have-we-learned-from-the-pandemic-so-far\/2022\/03\/22\/","title":{"rendered":"What Have We Learned from the Pandemic So Far?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

The title slide of an upcoming talk. You can see I’ve made great<\/em> progress.<\/p><\/div>\n

Dear Readers,<\/p>\n

I need your help.<\/p>\n

Recently one of my colleagues reached out and asked if I could give a talk to his research group.<\/p>\n

“Just give one of your canned Covid talks,” he said.<\/p>\n

Ha.<\/p>\n

Needless to say — but I will say it anyway — he’s not an ID doctor. Otherwise he’d know that, as I’ve said before, talks on COVID-19 become outdated as soon as you click the little save button (it’s a floppy disk icon) on your PowerPoint program.<\/p>\n

As a result, there’s no such thing as a “canned Covid talk” because you need to update them constantly. The field is constantly changing.<\/em><\/p>\n

(Small aside here — how long will that particular save icon be up there at the top of Microsoft Office programs? After all, people stopped using floppy disks in the late 1990s. My crack research team revealed that companies completely stopped making them over a decade ago<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

How quickly do these COVID talks become outdated? Much<\/em> faster than floppy disks. I’ve lectured multiple times on COVID-19 over the past 2 years, to a variety of medical and non-medical learners, and thought it might be interesting to see what a talk looked like just 6 months ago, back in September 2021 — an eternity in COVID time.<\/p>\n

(I’ve done talks since then, too, but let’s look at 6 months ago for the full effect.)<\/p>\n

It included these obsolete topics that one would be hard-pressed to include in a talk today:<\/p>\n