Collaborations Boom
Following the initial outbreak, collaborations between life science companies increased massively, the resulting discoveries and developments coming at a remarkably accelerated rate. There's no more perfect example of the results of these collaborations than the COVID-19 vaccines.
Under normal conditions, a vaccine can take up to 10-15 years to produce, allowing for the vaccine development as well as the trials and safety testing. Multiple vaccines for COVID-19 were produced in under a year. Before this, the fastest vaccine in the world was the vaccine for mumps, which took around 4 years to create.
Digitising Medicine
Shortly following the pandemic, the world was encouraged to stay apart and work from home when possible. Everyone was doing what they could do keep their distance, and that includes hospital and surgeries. From the start of the pandemic following all the way through to today, there's been a massive rise in 'telemedicine', a.k.a. virtual healthcare.
Before COVID-19, attending hospital appointments via Skype might have sounded like a pretty wild concept, but since the outbreak, life science staff have had to make some pretty major adjustments to how they work. Moving medical appointments online was a great way to reduce risk of transmissions in areas that were high-risk for COVID-19 exposure, like hospitals. While it took some getting used to, it worked well enough that virtual healthcare methods are still being used today.
Discoveries and Advances
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, massive amounts of money and resources have been poured into the life sciences industry. As a result, there have been a lot of new advances.
On top of the medical discoveries that have allowed for such developments such as the COVID-19 vaccines, there's also been development within the technologies that help us to make these discoveries. The advancement of the technology used during tests and experiments has allowed us to make more progress in shorter periods of time; in short, efficiency has massively spiked. Innovative developments are occurring at a much more rapid rate, and the results speak for themselves.
There's no denying that the pandemic was a global tragedy, and that the loss of life was devastating. However, the sudden chain of events that followed the outbreak did result in people worldwide being forced to change their way of thinking; technological advances displayed the resilience and ingenuity of the human race as we battled to keep the world running.
