On a table at the back of Phoebe Lostroh's classroom at Colorado College whirs a constant reminder that pandemics are not just the purview of the past.
It's called a Corsi-Rosenthal box, with the latter surname supplied by CC alumnus Jim Rosenthal, who partnered with Richard Corsi to create and free-share designs for the low-cost, suitcase-sized, "DIY air filtration system" during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in summer 2020.
"If you can afford a couple air filters and a box fan, you can afford one of these filtration units that will keep, for instance, a classroom much safer from both influenza and COVID 19," Lostroh said.
Fresh, clean air is an age-old curative (See: Colorado Springs' storied history as a tuberculosis retreat), but knowledge about its vital importance where humans are sharing close quarters during a disease outbreak -- and the technology to address the issue -- has been propelled by generations of painful and deadly awakenings, including COVID-19.
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Identified by scientists in December 2019, COVID claimed its first victim in Colorado, an El Paso County woman in her 80s, on March 13, 2020, five years ago Thursday.
By summer 2023, when the national emergency was ended and federal agencies stopped rigorously tracking cases and updating databases, COVID had led to more than 14,000 deaths in Colorado, and more than 1 million nationwide.
It's too soon to say definitively what role the pandemic played in the nation's storyline, but some of the hard lessons learned are practical context for the next generation of doctors, nurses, researchers and educators who take Lostroh's pre-med classes in Colorado Springs.
The go-to local expert for media seeking layman's explainers on what was happening after COVID emerged and began ravaging its way across the globe, Lostroh today teaches about pandemics -- including the 1918 Spanish Flu, and COVID in 2020 -- to help students in her microbiology and virology classes connect the science to "social issues and things that they have experienced in everyday life."
Case in point: the air filter box in the back of the room.
Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and pandemics have historically served as flashpoints inspiring advancements and innovations in understanding the virology and mechanism of infectious diseases, as well as how to fight and, ideally, prevent them, said Lostroh, whose teachings tie in pandemics dating back to the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages.
"All kinds of health problems inspire us (as a nation) to do research in virology. I would say that pandemics have been used as a reason to invest in understanding the evolution and the pathogenesis of infectious diseases, and especially vaccinations," Lostroh said.
The lion's share of research after the Spanish flu was funded by the military, she said. Before service members returning from World War I spread the virus to civilian populations, leading to a U.S. pandemic, 1918-1920, America lost more troops to disease than combat, with influenza largely to blame.
In 1945, America introduced its first influenza vaccine, developed by researchers including polio vaccine pioneer Jonas Salk, the result of work inspired in large part by the Spanish Flu outbreak decades prior.
The early scrum of great global minds, funding and support for the fight against COVID-19 led to the relatively speedy creation of a drug to lessen symptoms, Paxlovid, and then a vaccine, Lostroh said.
"COVID-19 has been cracked with the best science technology from the very beginning of its inception," said Lostroh. Researchers involved in other projects dropped what they were doing to focus on the pandemic. "I think there was a huge coming together of the biological community of researchers to get as much research on the virus done in a short time.
"It was also the first pandemic in the era of sequencing virus genomes," Lostroh added, "our first example of following a pandemic from the beginning to the end using molecular biology."
Such maps could prove invaluable to future researchers.
But the biology and virology of a pandemic are only pieces of the understanding.
The thinking of those who survive has always driven what's next.
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According to a pandemic five-year study by The Pew Research Center, three-quarters of Americans said the COVID-19 years took some toll on their lives. Riding as it did, on the heels of fracturing politics and the rise of social media and rising doubt of mainstream news and official sources, it drove many deeper into their divergent corners.
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The "nonpartisan fact tank" also found that most Americans said they had moved on with their lives:
"Among U.S. adults overall, about 1 in 5 (21%) now say the coronavirus is a major threat to the health of the U.S. population as a whole. And a majority (56%) think it's no longer something we really need to worry about much."
The future of disease study, and defense, may be rooted in the past. But the past is easily forgotten, and how it's remembered isn't written in stone.
On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, established in the wake of World War II, to "address the health challenges arising from the war, promote international cooperation in health, and work towards achieving health for all people globally."
According to the White House, the withdrawal of WHO's largest single global backer was partially a response to the organization's "mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic."
During his confirmation hearings last week on Capitol Hill, Trump's nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health, Stanford University health researcher Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, faced questions about his take on the government's responsibilities during a health crisis, and praise from Republican senators for famously opposing mask and vaccine mandates and school closures.
Bhattacharya also supported the idea of "herd immunity" during the pandemic, a strategy the then-NIH director said would have cost the nation "hundreds of thousands" of lives.
Bhattacharya isn't the only American who saw the pandemic times as an eye-opener about government overreach, which worsened an already bad situation by delivering a devastating -- and, as some see it, largely avoidable -- blow to the economy.
Former El Paso County Commissioner Longinos Gonzales was a vocal advocate for local businesses seeking waivers to open, in some capacity, during the shutdowns, and he sees that impact as steering longer-term tides socially, and politically.
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"The long-term shutdowns and mandates were devastating to the state and the country. They hurt our students, our businesses and our families, and I believe that five years later, history has validated my and other leaders' assessments from back then that the long-term shutdowns were the wrong thing to do," Gonzales said.
He isn't arguing that the COVID-19 pandemic wasn't "terrible," just that the response went too far, compounding the pain and complicating still-ongoing economic and social recovery.
"I think that the poor economy and inflation the last several years likely led to President Trump's resurgence and successful victory last year," Gonzales said. "That excessive reaction negatively affected probably a decade of history in a way that I hope we fully recover from, and I still greatly fear for the students who are barely entering adulthood. How did it affect them lifelong?"
Opposition to the shutdowns of public gathering places, including churches and schools, is well documented by news outlets, here and nationwide, during the Spanish flu. Perhaps because of the war that had just ended, and roiling unrest overseas, "people came together" after the influenza outbreak of 1918.
Not so COVID.
Lostroh said she worries the current schism will quickly cost the U.S. its title as the global gold standard of science and medical innovation.
She's already seeing impacts, and they don't bode well.
"Normally, in any given year, I have three or four advisees who want to go to graduate school and earn a Ph.D. in some kind of biomedical research," she said. "This year, for the first time ever in my 22 years as a professor here, I've had very good students apply to graduate school and not get in because they've been told that the number of funded Ph.D. positions available is only 30% of what it had been last year."
She estimated the nation stands to lose two-thirds of its future biomedical research workforce because of the recent, drastic cuts to the budget NIH taps to award grants, as well as the firing -- in February -- of more than 1,000 staff members.
America stands on the brink of losing a generation of medical and scientific minds, Lostroh said.
Best-case scenario, we're queued up for a setback of at least a decade.
"It's really going to be devastating for the whole field of virology, because the NIH is the anchor that drives all virology research, and not just the United States, either," she said. "It's the best source of funding for the best research in the world."
During his confirmation hearings last week, Bhattacharya stopped short of saying whether he would push back against the drastic cuts to the agency he's been tapped to lead, the heretofore largest funder of biomedical research in the world.