Triennium: A 3-year Pandemic Recap

Although time seemed to stand still, many things happened in the last three years.

The current month of December 2022 will mark the first three years since newscasts around the world, social networks, and the communication offices of official health agencies spread a news item of unsuspected scope at the time. It was the outbreak of a new epidemic infection in a populous Chinese city of more than eleven million inhabitants: Wuhan, in the province of Hubei. So naturally, the disease did not yet have an official name.

It soon became known that the causative virus was a new member of the well-known and numerous Coronaviridae family, provisionally named nCoV-2019. A viral family known because of some members, two of the four so-called endemic respiratory coronaviruses (229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1), identified by science since the 1960s.

These coronaviruses cause 5–30% of upper respiratory infections in children and young people. In other words, they are responsible for some of the numerous and annoying colds that recur every autumn-winter season. They can appear in the same season because they do not leave lasting immunity, although they can generate a certain…