When will this finally end? This is the question of many minds after a year of living through Covid-19 pandemic.
But public health experts say yes we have an answer and you won’t like it: COVID-19 will never end. Now it seems ready to become an endemic disease, which is always part of our environment, no matter what we do.
“We’ve been told this virus will go away. But no,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and medical director of the National Infectious Diseases Foundation, told CBS News.
“We have to control it. We have to lessen its impact. But it will be a problem for the foreseeable future. And by that I mean, years.”
The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. A year later, the virus infected 118 million people worldwide and killed more than 2.6 million, including more than 530,000 Americans, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University.
At the same time, several effective COVID vaccines they developed at an unprecedented rate and have already been managed by nearly 330 million people worldwide.
But researchers say there is simply no history of total eradication of infectious diseases, and everything about COVID-19 proves it will be no different.
“The more infectious a microbe is, the harder it is to control,” Dr. Tom Frieden, general manager of Resolve To Save Lives and former director of CDC, told CBS News. “COVID is very difficult to control and the new variants suggest we could end up playing some kind of cat and mouse game.”
Before COVID, people were already used to living with endemic diseases. The flu is an example. Measles is another. Both continue to spread and kill people each year despite decades of vaccination and containment.
Even the virus that causes COVID-19 is just a new type of coronavirus; other coronaviruses had been circulating for some time and in some cases could cause the common cold. COVID itself has already gone through mutations that made it more contagious and potentially more deadly.
The only infectious disease in modern history that was eradicated worldwide was smallpox, which the World Health Organization declared eradicated in 1980. But it was almost 200 years after the first vaccine was created. against smallpox. Smallpox also spread relatively slowly and people who had it developed a distinctive rash, making it easier to identify and control the disease.
The new coronavirus, on the other hand, is highly contagious and causes many asymptomatic infections. You can’t look at someone and know if they have the virus. COVID-19 has also been shown to spread to animals and humans, with confirmed infections in tigers, gorillas, apes, minks, cats and dogs.
Scientists say all of this makes the virus essentially impossible to control.
“It’s quite unrealistic to think that we can eliminate a virus from both the human population and its natural reservoirs,” Dr. Anita McElroy of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine told CBS News.
He adds that since many people will choose not to get vaccinated, for medical reasons or for personal opposition to the vaccine, the world will always have “pockets of the population where the virus continues to spread and is susceptible.”
But doctors say the fact that COVID is here to stay doesn’t mean it disrupts our lives as much as it has over the past year. Vaccination and containment measures will eventually control the pandemic, potentially turning COVID into another disease with which we simply learn to live with.
Schaffner points out that the flu continues to be a serious threat, infecting millions of Americans and killing tens of thousands each year, and yet it has become so familiar that many people don’t even bother to get vaccinated every time. year.
“Could it be because of the way we become familiar with COVID that we also develop a certain indifference to it?” he says. “Yes. We usually do it in the United States.”
Schaffner says it would be best to give up the idea of “returning to normalcy” and instead settle for the “new normalcy” where COVID continues to shape our lives.
Vaccines against COVID could become an annual ritual for millions. Masks may be common for the elderly and people with underlying conditions. Family celebrations could be set up by those who are vaccinated, while the most vulnerable people are only joined by Zoom.
“The third, fourth and fifth year of COVID shouldn’t be as far away as the first,” he says. But, in this new normalcy, “many of us will no longer be as carefree as before.”