A study published yesterday predicts that eventually COVID-19 will be just another endemic virus that circulates in the population, but it rarely makes someone seriously ill. How quickly we reach that point will depend on the speed of our vaccination implementation.
“The time required to reach this type of endemic state depends on how quickly the disease is spreading and how quickly the vaccination is implemented,” said Jennie Lavine, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, who led the study. …
While all of these coronaviruses produce a similar immune response, the new virus is more similar to the endemic coronaviruses of the common cold, suggested Dr. Lavine and colleagues.
The viruses that cause the common cold have already spread to people around the world. Most people are exposed to these viruses for the first time in childhood, when their immune response is strong. And over time, people are reinfected and their immune response to the cold virus gets stronger. The reason the coronavirus is so deadly is because it is essentially a new virus that is hitting the immune systems of older people, who are less able to fight it. If they had found the same virus as children and developed resistance, they would not be so sick now.
Another possible scenario, in which the vaccine completely prevents the virus from spreading until it disappears, is less likely in this case:
“I fully agree with the general intellectual construction of the article,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego.
If vaccines prevent people from transmitting the virus, “then it becomes much more like the measles scenario, where you vaccinate everyone, including children, and you really don’t see the virus infecting people anymore,” said Crotty.
It is more plausible that vaccines prevent disease – but not necessarily infection and transmission, he added. And that means that the coronavirus will continue to circulate.
If the study’s authors are correct, it will take a year or maybe a few to get there, but eventually COVID will just be a kind of background noise for most people’s health. When your child catches a cold, it will be COVID and they will shrug and this early exposure will protect them later. In fact, the story mentions the theory that a deadly pandemic that killed a million people in 1890 was caused by one of the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold. This outbreak ended when people built natural resistance.
However, there is a third possibility. The Times cites Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health, who suggests that it is possible that the coronavirus is more like seasonal flu, that is, something that has good years and bad years. “Their prediction of becoming a common cold coronavirus is where I would put a lot of my money,” said Lipsitch, but added, “But I don’t think it’s absolutely guaranteed.”