From the Black Death and smallpox through malaria, measles, mumps, SARS and Ebola, pandemics have always plagued humanity. Each provided painful lessons, and the degree of pain is often a reflection of human error—the same errors of the past continued into the present now and the future tomorrow.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the latest, but surely not the last. Still, I was surprised in early March 2020 when Nancy Binkin, MD, my infectious disease colleague in the Division of Epidemiology, told me, “Life as we know it is over.”

I studied the first recognized U.S. outbreak of COVID-19 in a Kirkland, WA nursing home. It was reported on February 28th that a virus had infected 129 people and killed 23. This happened near my longtime former home in the Seattle area and in one of the most capable public health systems in the United States.

I listened to the public federal bickering on March 7th about whether Americans on a cruise ship docked in the Bay Area should be allowed to disembark to care for the sick and protect those still healthy, and the unconscionable consideration that everyone should stay on board so that U.S. numbers of COVID cases would not double.

Before the emergence of COVID-19, on the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, a special section in the November issue of the American Journal of Public Health was devoted to prescient reflections on the lessons learned and not learned during the past century.

These papers make clear that none of us should be surprised by the repeated history we observed in 2020. The accompanying editorial by Wendy E. Parmet and Mark A. Rothstein identified three leading attitudinal threats: hubris, isolationism and distrust.

These attitudes breed misinformation. In 1918, as in 2020, both pandemic viruses prompted all manner of misinformation, sometimes misguided, sometimes malign.

Woodrow Wilson severely curtailed accurate reporting to Americans during the pandemic as a wartime measure when he signed the Sedition Act in 1918. It was repealed by Congress in December 1920.

In 1918, controversy existed about the usefulness and legality of face masks, which resulted in various pressure tactics by both sides of the debate. This led to San Francisco establishing a mandatory mask ordinance in October 1918 and an organized campaign against the law in 1919 by the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco.
A “public service announcement” published in the San Francisco Chronicle in October 1918 declared that “the man or woman or child who will not wear a mask now is a dangerous slacker.” I cannot help but wonder why solid research on the effectiveness of masking for the general public as a defense against viruses spread by respiratory droplets from person to person was so lacking 100 years later when Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, first commented on whether we should wear them. Eventually, mask mandates during COVID-19 were followed by news reports of angry protestors storming grocery stores to demand an end to enforced masking.

A highly transmissible and deadly global pandemic will unmask every weakness in our larger society, but in public health, our research unveils these weaknesses routinely. Our raised voices calling out the harms of poverty, gun violence, lack of health care and all manner of oppression are largely ignored.

The same inequalities that influence nearly every aspect of our lives, from education and employment to housing to health care, to the safety of front line workers and care of our most vulnerable older Americans have been highly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Already burdened by myriad social and economic disadvantages, people of color, women and essential workers, from store clerks to bus drivers, struggled to survive — and many did not.

Black, Latino and Native American communities were disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and died at rates far above those of white people.

I also know that we in public health will spend the next several decades trying to understand the full impact of the events of 2020 on those of us who survived COVID-19 across the holistic spectrum of physical, cognitive, emotional and mental health.

Together, we have navigated the immense challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have had the privilege to be a part of some much-needed moments of hope in my role as associate vice chancellor for Health Sciences Advancement. Even in the face of uncertainty and unrest, there has been an outpouring of philanthropic support.

What stands out to me more than any dollar amount was the commitment of our community to our tripartite mission — comprising research, education and care — and the community’s dedication to ensuring UC San Diego was equipped to rise to the challenge of COVID-19 in addition to maintaining its incredible portfolio of projects spanning every facet of the health sciences.

Research has been a central focus of much of our work over the past year. With the onset of COVID-19, we knew that there were few places equipped to contribute to battling this new illness quite like UC San Diego. Thanks to the gifts of philanthropists such as the Tu Foundation — which gave $1 million in support of Dr. Davey Smith’s efforts to develop new diagnostics, therapies and ways to track the virus — we were able to immediately begin understanding and pushing back against COVID-19.

An anonymous donor made a significant gift in support of Dr. Lars Bode’s work, which was central to providing global guidance on COVID and breast milk, helping new families navigate caring for a newborn amidst a pandemic.

Philanthropy also allowed us to be a leader in the development and testing of COVID-19 vaccines, which we knew would be the key to beating this disease. Many others invested in our COVID-19 efforts, and not only to research.

As a public university, and one of the top in the nation for health sciences, education lies at the heart of our mission. With the emergence of COVID-19, we pivoted to online learning, but early on we knew that eventually, we would need to bring our students and faculty back to campus to continue their learning and research.

Return to Learn was a comprehensive program that allowed us to reopen campus safely.
Philanthropy was central to that. Even prior to the pandemic, the philanthropy of Dr. Herbert Wertheim, Vanessa Wertheim and the Wertheim family established The Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science which helped lead the way for Return to Learn.

Through a three-part strategy encompassing risk mitigation, viral detection and clinical intervention, we made sure that as we welcomed people back on campus, we limited their risk of exposure to the virus, kept an eye out for anywhere the virus might be present and supported students with COVID-19 so that their needs were met until they recovered.

UC San Diego Foundation Trustee Dene Oliver and his wife Elizabeth made the first major gift to our COVID-19 Emergency Response Fund, which expanded testing and diagnostics, advanced clinical trials and supported members of the UC San Diego community — including students — who faced various challenges due to COVID-19.

Gary and Jean Shekhter supported the San Diego Epidemiology and Research for COVID-19 Health (SEARCH) alliance, a collaborative study co-led by UC San Diego, Scripps Research and Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego aimed at helping local businesses and employees return to work safely. Working together was central to continuing operations on campus and beyond.

Philanthropy played a critical role in our clinical response. From the very earliest days of the pandemic, we knew that in order to rise to the challenge of COVID-19, we would need to increase our capacity to care for people with the disease.

To that end, philanthropists such as Joe Tsai and Clara Wu, as well as the Conrad Prebys Foundation, made gifts that supported acquisition of resources for our care staff so that they were protected as they worked on the front lines.

The generosity of our community also allowed us to open La Jolla Family House, normally reserved for patients’ families, as an on-campus housing area for medical staff so that they could care for patients without endangering loved ones at home.

And when the day came when vaccines were finally available, philanthropy allowed us to distribute them quickly and efficiently. A partnership between us, the San Diego Padres, the County of San Diego and the City of San Diego allowed UC San Diego Health to establish a vaccine superstation in the parking lot of Petco Park. At its peak, the site was administering more than 5,000 doses per day — roughly 225,000 in total.

However, we also recognize that COVID-19 has had an outsized impact on communities of color and underserved neighborhoods. The Hood Family Foundation stepped in to support mobile vaccine clinics, pop-up sites in the neighborhoods where disparity was most prevalent, so that the people there had access to a lifesaving intervention.
But our donors remained cognizant of many other illnesses that weren’t taking a break because COVID-19 appeared.

Philanthropists
made truly transformational gifts such as:

• Hanna and Mark Gleiberman who helped establish Gleiberman Head and Neck Cancer Center, part of Moores Cancer Center, to redefine the way we understand and treat head and neck cancers.

• Steven Strauss and Lise Wilson made a gift to the Cardiovascular Institute establishing the Strauss Wilson Center for Cardiomyopathy, allowing us to redefine care for heart disease.

• Several families, including Iris and Matthew Strauss, Sally and John Hood, Karen and Don Cohn and Humberto and Czarina Lopez, all supported the creation of new endowed chairs across several health sciences areas.

• Kristin Farmer, founder and CEO of ACES, made a gift to establish the Autism Comprehensive Educational Services (ACES) Innovation Project, advancing autism diagnosis research.

These and more, far more than a single article could do justice to, ensured that we continued battling old diseases even in the face of new ones. Philanthropy has been a vital part of every facet of UC San Diego Health and UC San Diego Health Sciences. The proof is in the thousands of gifts made — and the countless lives those gifts have impacted — in our region and around the world.

We are excited for what’s to come, but we cannot sustain and grow the level of achievement our physician-scientists, clinicians and students attain without the continued partnership of our community. You have brought us this far; we are eager to move forward with you at our side. Thank you.

In grueling and revealing ways, the COVID-19 pandemic took our measure, both as individuals and as a society. It tested our empathy and compassion, our ability to regulate emotions, to self-reflect, to accept divergent perspectives, to advocate for the common good and to act with decisiveness.

These are all components of wisdom, empirically determined and the subject of ongoing scientific research. They are based in biology, correlating with distinct regions of the brain, which means they can be measured and modified. Each of these wisdom components, in combination with others like curiosity, sense of humor and spirituality, provide insight into how wise we are, where we excel and where we fall short. You don’t need maximum scores for every component to be wise. That’s nearly impossible. All humans are mixed bags.

And so too were our results in terms of how wisely we handled the pandemic. In the beginning, we all were scared, uncertain of what to expect or what to do. We received contradictory and changing advice from experts who were themselves unsure of what was happening. But then, slowly, the reality became clearer. We knew the danger but also developed an idea about what the eventual solution would be — vaccines.

For some of us, the pandemic prompted personal growth. We tapped or expanded reservoirs of compassion. We deepened relationships with our families and friends. We listened to others and acted reasonably and responsibly. We discovered new strengths. We became wiser.

For others though, things got worse, especially in the first months of the crisis. Rates of alcohol and drug use rose, as did overdose deaths and suicides, though the last two phenomena predate the pandemic and are consequences of very complicated social trends. Divisions and disputes abounded; the components of wisdom, like personal protective equipment at times, seemed in short supply.

But I cannot fault those who fell short, at least not too severely. The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis unlike any other for most of us. It affected more people around the world, directly and indirectly, than any previous public health crisis in recent memory. In the early days, before widespread vaccination began to turn the tide, uncertainty, despondency and fear felt universal. Racial and socioeconomic disparities exposed and exacerbated harms.

Traditional customs and values were set aside. Social distancing became a necessary norm, but it initially brought with it a sense of rejection and rebuff. Why is that person crossing to the other side of the road? I remember attending meetings before we all retreated into the digital world of Zoom and extending naturally, automatically, my hand in introduction, only to quickly withdraw it. Fist and elbow bumps don’t quite convey the same personal connection.

However, as a society, I think we responded well overall, even in the context of divided and divisive leadership in different arenas. Arguments and public displays over mask wearing were common. Opposition to this simple and extraordinarily effective way to reduce viral transmission and protect the health of others was notoriously vocal at times and in some places, but the fact is that most Americans wore masks when and where required — and they began doing so from the beginning.

Similarly, we got better at washing our hands and keeping our distance. We didn’t panic. There were crazy and unexpected shortages — remember grocery store shelves devoid of pasta and toilet paper? But these didn’t lead to riots. People, businesses and institutions found workarounds and solutions. We learned how to live differently.

A decade or two from now, historians and others will look hardest at case rates and deaths. In some ways, these massively tragic numbers reflect the successes and failures of our individual and communal behaviors, but mostly they are the product of a previously unknown virus with extraordinary transmissibility and a penchant to kill those with underlying risk factors, such as old age or pre-existing diseases.

To our credit and to all of the scientists and health care professionals at all levels, as well as others who raced to understand the novel coronavirus and how best to treat COVID-19, humanity has come out on the winning side. Not entirely and not without deep wounds and scars, but we’re here. Having largely controlled the virus in the U.S., we have started working on helping the less fortunate people in other parts of the world.

The question now is whether the pandemic has made us better and wiser, as individuals and as a society. No one predicted the precise scope and scale of the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is an absolute certainty that other pandemics will follow. The French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922) once wrote: “We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

Are we wiser now than we were before SARS-CoV-2 became a well-recognized and much-dreaded collection of letters and numbers? I think so. I hope so. Time will tell.

The first time I stepped foot on campus, all I could see was gray. Granted, my freshman orientation was in the middle of June, and San Diego has long been known for its June gloom. “It gets better, I promise,” my orientation leader told my skeptical group.

The first time I saw UC San Diego with my own eyes as an 18-year-old high school graduate, I hated it. It wasn’t just the sky that was gray. It was the buildings, the dorms, the hallways. As we ambled through Ridge Walk for our brief campus tour, I wondered how a campus that was almost 2,000 acres in size could be constructed entirely of concrete and sharp edges.

My orientation leader was right. The sun started peeking through the sharp edges when I moved in during the month of September 2017. Library Walk, which had been almost deserted when I last saw it, was pulsing with life. The voices were vibrant, inviting, intoxicating. Everyone wanted me to be involved. Everyone was excited. That made me excited.

With time, I began to find little cracks of color seeping through the gray. There were reds and greens in my professors’ slides during lectures. There were pinks and neutrals in the tones of my club members during our weekly meetings. There was a spot of blue if you tilted your head to look at the little house perched on top of the engineering building. And just across the way, the neon lights of the Stuart Arts art piece on the Center for Memory and Recording Research shot through the darkness of the night.

But the biggest reason I grew to love the campus was because of the people I would see every day. Hustling to class to make it for clicker points in the nick of time, stopping by a coffee shop for a quick caffeine buzz, walking with friends to one place or another. Not people I always knew, but students just like me. Trying to make the most of the time they had on the campus they called their home.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the colors I had grown accustomed to seeing slowly drained away. I used to love standing on the third floor of Geisel Library during passing period and peering over the edge to look at the flow of life underneath. You couldn’t see a single cobblestone on Library Walk, just a mass of students ebbing and flowing, the arteries pouring life into the campus gray. At the end of March 2020, right as everything was closing down, I stood on the third floor for the last time before I graduated. I could see the cobblestones again, and I knew nothing would be the same.

The pinks and neutrals of weekly club meetings became the familiar, colorless drone of Zoom gatherings that finished in half the usual time because the lively chatter was gone. Instead of seeing friends’ faces on the walk to class, I saw them through a camera screen. During the pandemic, we were isolated. We felt alone. The gray was back.

The past year has been a whirlwind blur for me — and I’m sure for many other students as well. We didn’t have much time to react. We were just forced to adapt. We didn’t have our annual events to look forward to. No Sun God, no Bear Garden, no Senior Send-off, no commencement.

I didn’t see any spark to reignite our student body until the civil unrest that rocked our country in the Summer of 2020 rose up to grip students of our own community. I saw these students stand, speak out, walk on the streets. I saw other students join in solidarity, offering to help. I saw students demand for justice. I was there. I wrote about it for the campus newspaper, and I saw the spark spread.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, students began to realize that maybe good grades weren’t everything that constituted a solid higher education. In our own quarantine bubbles, we wrestled with other demons. Depression and anxiety settling in during isolation. Family members and friends affected by the coronavirus. The loss of an entire year of their college education. As we navigated a roller coaster of emotions, we remained steadfast. We realized that our college experience was not just measured by the events we went to or the number of A’s on our transcript. It was measured by the memories we carried of the people who most mattered to us. So we kept finding ways to learn, to adapt, to grow. We kept looking for the color in the gray.

We set up our own Zoom movie and game nights. We watched livestreamed concerts with our friends. We sent letters through snail mail. We picked up new hobbies, found new shows to watch. We still graduated and held remote celebrations. We persevered.

Four years after I first set foot on campus, my in-person commencement ceremony was limiting and bittersweet. My family and friends could not be there, due to COVID-19 protocols. I missed them. But I knew they were watching on their screens somewhere, still celebrating with me. Even in the remote pandemic landscape, we students still figured out a way to be there for one another in spirit.

In my four years at UC San Diego, I voted in my first election, witnessed protests firsthand, made friends to last a lifetime and experienced a global pandemic. My college experience can be summed up in a rainbow of colors. And the greatest lesson I will always take away is the ability to find color in any shade of gray, regardless of where I find myself.

After countless Zoom meetings, daily screenings, masked practices and some hopeful thinking, we got the green light to play in our first Division I women’s basketball competition against Cal Baptist University on December 21, 2020 at RIMAC Arena.

It had been nine months since we had last played a game together in the gym, and for a brief period, it felt like things were falling back into place. Because we were newcomers to the Big West Conference, we were considered underdogs and not expected to perform at the same level as everybody else.

That game, however, proved that we were not only capable but determined to show up and show out. We were up at halftime by three points and were eager to finish with a win. Of course, it was impossible to shut out the growing COVID-19 pandemic, and reality quickly set back in (I did say it was for a brief period of time).

As some might know, our game was cut short due to a potential positive test from the other team. While we were disappointed that we did not finish the game, we all came out of RIMAC Arena with the same electric energy, knowing that we could still compete and successfully comply with all the COVID-19 protocols and demands.

It quickly became obvious that we would all need to adapt a lot and often to continue with our season. This applied to all of our travel games, bus rides, locker room set-ups and meal distributions. Throughout the year, our team emphasized the importance of flexibility. We were told we would have to wear masks for the first eight weeks of practice. Fine. We would have to be tested three to four times a week to play. Great. All of our classes would be online for the foreseeable future. Awesome.

At one point, I would have to run to the end of the gym, whip out my computer or borrow someone else’s, take a 10-minute quiz, and then race back to the court to practice out-of-bound plays. We knew, though, that these were required steps if we wanted to play. We learned how to get creative with our conditioning and lifting workouts and developed new ways to cheer for each other on the sidelines. Our athletic training staff was determined to make sure that all tests and screenings were completed before entering the gym, not afraid to call out those who were behind. Our coaches made sure we kept our distance during drills and wore our masks when required. We established trust and accountability for one another.

We made it a consistent goal to always remember how lucky we were; lucky that we were one of the few teams to have anything remotely close to a season; lucky that we were all healthy enough to run up and down the court; lucky that we had our friends and families to cheer us on through laptop and TV screens.

Many student-athletes over the past year or so weren’t as lucky. Many saw their college careers concluded without a proper send-off. We saw the pain in the eyes and faces of our seniors, who were with us in Hawaii for the NCAA first-round playoffs when we learned about the severity of COVID-19 and its ramifications for our season. Every game we played and every opportunity we had during practices and lifts, we did our best to remember that at any minute we could easily be in their shoes.

We were also reminded that, if we learned anything, it is that most things are bigger than athletics. As I write this, it is important to note that I can’t possibly speak for every person on our team because we all experienced our own individual struggles and hardships during the most insane year of our lives.

Between the ongoing social injustices in our country — highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement — and the impact this pandemic continues to have on the collective and individual mental health of so many, it seemed impossible to think that college basketball would be a sufficient Band-Aid.

It wasn’t and isn’t.

But coming together to educate and support one another, as well as understand each person’s limits and comfort with the challenges each day offered, was a starting point. We made it a goal on our team to check in with each other and make the space between us as comfortable as possible. This was important to establish and maintain for both our physical and mental well-being. And for many student-athletes across the globe, the choice to come back and play was extremely personal. I have respect for anybody who had to make that decision, whatever it turned out to be.

Because we were so meticulous about staying safe and following all of the guidelines, playing basketball, especially at the Division I level, did not seem as daunting or massive as we originally thought. There were struggles throughout the season, but we competed every game, and at the end of the day, it was basketball, something simple and second nature to us all. As we played in the middle of a pandemic, the Big West didn’t seem so big.