Forty years ago, an international effort wiped out smallpox. Eliminating COVID-19 would be harder.

Quoted: “We were really, really close two years ago and then the number ticked up in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Sarah Paige, a former post-doctoral fellow from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who now works at the CORE Group Polio Project dedicated to eradicating the disease. In 2019, the number of polio cases rose to 94.