When will it finally end? That is the question in many minds after a year of living through Pandid-19 pandemic.
But public health experts say we have an answer and you won’t like it: COVID-19 will never end. Now it looks set to become an endemic disease – a disease that will always be part of our environment, no matter what we do.
“We were told that this virus will disappear. But it won’t,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, told CBS News.
“We need to control it. We need to lessen its impact. But it will be out there bothering us 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, from according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
At the same time, several effective COVID vaccines they were developed at an unprecedented rate and have been administered to almost 330 million people worldwide.
But the researchers say there is simply no history of infectious diseases being completely eradicated, and everything about COVID-19 shows that it will be no different.
“The more infectious a microbe is, the more difficult it is to control it,” Dr. Tom Frieden, CEO of Resolve To Save Lives and former director of CDC, told CBS News. “COVID is very challenging to control and the new variants suggest that we might end up playing some kind of cat and mouse game.”
Before COVID, people were used to living with endemic diseases. The flu is an example. Measles is another. Both continue to spread and kill people every 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 a long time and, in some cases, could cause the common cold. COVID himself has already undergone mutations that have made him more contagious and potentially deadly.
The only infectious disease in modern history to be eliminated worldwide was smallpox, which the World Health Organization declared eradicated in 1980. But that was almost 200 years after the creation of the first smallpox vaccine. Smallpox has also spread relatively slowly and people who contracted it have developed a characteristic rash, making the disease easier to identify and control.
The new coronavirus, in turn, is highly contagious, while causing many asymptomatic infections. You cannot look at someone and know if that person has the virus. COVID-19 has also been shown to spread to animals and humans, with confirmed infections in tigers, gorillas, monkeys, mink, cats and dogs.
Scientists say that all of this makes the virus essentially impossible to control.
“It is very 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.
She adds that since many people will choose not to be vaccinated – whether for medical reasons or for personal opposition to the vaccine – the world will always have “pockets of population where the virus continues to spread and is susceptible”.
But doctors say that just because COVID is here to stay doesn’t mean it will disrupt our lives as much as it did last year. Vaccination and containment measures will eventually keep the pandemic in check, potentially turning COVID into another disease that we simply learn to live with.
Schaffner points out that the flu remains a serious threat – infecting millions of Americans and killing tens of thousands every year – and yet it has become so familiar that many people don’t even mind being vaccinated against it every year.
“Could it be that in the future we have become so familiar with COVID that we have also developed a certain indifference towards it?” he says. “Yes. We usually do that in the United States.”
Schaffner says it would be better to give up on the idea of ”getting back to normal” and instead go for the “new normal”, where COVID continues to shape our lives.
COVID vaccination could become an annual ritual for millions. Masks can remain common for the elderly and people with underlying diseases. Your family’s celebrations can be shaped by those who are vaccinated, while the most vulnerable people only adhere to Zoom.
“COVID’s third, fourth and fifth years shouldn’t be as terrible as the first,” he says. But in this new normal, “many of us will no longer be as carefree as we used to be”.