"There's just so much we don't know"

The Covidization of Science

The term “novel virus” still keeps getting thrown around a lot. In the grand scheme of things, I guess it makes sense to refer to it that way, considering that other respiratory diseases like influenza and tuberculosis have been described by medical science for over 100 years. Relatively speaking, 2 1/2 years may not seem like a lot. However, what I’ve found is that most often when that phrase is used, it’s in the context of a statement that calls into question our understanding of Sars-Cov2, as if it’s still brand new and we know absolutely nothing about it, nor have we made any progress at all scientifically to understand it. Yes, some still assert that “there’s just so much we don’t know.”

I wanted to test that hypothesis by doing a simple comparison. If somehow by now we have not amassed any serious body of knowledge around Covid-19, despite the massive attention by governments, institutions, and the public, it should be pretty clear in the data. My method here is somewhat rudimentary, but I think it illustrates the point. In comparison to other respiratory illnesses and infectious diseases that we have known about for decades (or more), how much knowledge do we have?

Rather than rely on search results from google or other algorithm-based search engines, I decided to leverage Scopus, a curated academic database that indexes research papers, authors, and citations. Here are the results.