There was a previous article in the journal The Atlantic, and some of the data and content in it may go some way to answering this question [1].
First of all, the landscape of the scientific community has changed dramatically in the context of the new crown epidemic control. Scientists in almost every field, have switched tracks, out of their own line of work, and are running off to study the new crown.
For example, Jennifer Doudna, the Nobel Prize-winning author of CRISPR gene editing, stopped her team's work when the epidemic began to spread rapidly in the United States in March of last year, and shifted their efforts to researching the new crown virus, trying to develop a new crown test using CRISPR gene editing technology. At the time, because of the shortage of neo-crown test reagents in the United States, Jennifer also converted her lab into a neo-crown testing center to do tests for local people.
And then, for example, some physicists came over to build models to simulate viral propagation trends, and some immunologists who had been studying bacteria turned around and started studying viruses. And scientists who had been studying the olfactory nerves came over and started studying why some of the newly crowned infected had lost their sense of smell. This eventually led to an explosive result, from the beginning of the new crown epidemic to the present, PubMed has added as many as 9W + papers related to the new crown. What kind of concept is that? This number is more than twice the total number of papers related to other infectious diseases such as cholera and measles combined! And these infectious diseases have been around for hundreds of years!
Additionally, this shift in focus in one direction has fostered another dimension of progress in academia, and that is that the new collaborative mechanism has greatly improved the efficiency of knowledge dissemination. Because the new crown is an urgent public **** event, so many research results if the traditional journal review mechanism, published out of the yellow flowers are cold. So researchers began to popularize the habit of first putting their papers on preprint platforms like BioRxiv, medRxiv, arXiv that are open to the public. Take medRxiv, a medical preprint platform, for example, at the beginning of 2020n, there were only about 1,000 preprints on the platform, and by October, that number had spiked to 1.2W+
and The fact that these preprint platforms are basically free, and anyone can "whore" them out for free (I've done a lot of that myself ......) has, to a certain extent, greatly accelerated the enjoyment and popularization of the latest research results***. As a result of this situation, a team of researchers has done some research and found that new crown-related papers have a higher chance of being published by researchers who have never collaborated with each other before, compared to biomedical papers in general [2].
Of course this phenomenon is not without its drawbacks, such as unreviewed findings, which can also be wrong, which can be misleading, such as last n March, when two biogeographers published a preprint online predicting that the neocoronavirus would have a relatively mild impact on the tropics based on the fact that the virus doesn't survive as well in warmer, more humid conditions. But obviously the current outbreak in Brazil has put that conclusion to bed, but at the time the results attracted a lot of attention, not only by more than 50 news outlets, but even by the United Nations World Food Program [3].
So what, this kind of problem can not be a pole hit s said is getting faster or slower, anything has two sides, benevolent and wise, I can only say that this new crown epidemic, so that the scientific community to recognize some of the new mode of cooperation and development, at this level, undoubtedly is a good thing.