Two years of COVID-19: many lessons, but will we learn?

It has been two years since 11 March 2020 when the Director General of the World Health Organization announced that coronavirus disease (COVID-19) had become pandemic. Since then, the disease has had devastating consequences worldwide with more than 6 million reported deaths by early March 2022, and an estimated economic damage of around 84.54 trillion USD to the world’s economy in 2020. In the European Union, COVID-19 has resulted in an unprecedented economic contraction with real gross national product falling by 6.1% in 2020.