Right now, in the midst of a global pandemic, it may be difficult to think more than a few months ahead. But centuries of data tell us that this pandemic will also end. Yes, it will end, the pandemic will surely end. It just doesn't mean the virus will go away forever, though. So what will its role be?
Years of data tell us that it is incredibly difficult to eradicate an infectious disease. Even with a highly effective vaccine. A study released this week in the journal Science, suggests that at the end of the pandemic, the novel coronavirus could turn into a seasonal disease in the coming years, similar to the common cold or, at worst, the annual flu virus.
How will Covid behave at the end of the pandemic?
To better understand how the new virus might behave in the years to come, the researchers looked at how other known coronaviruses work. COVID-2, the official name of the virus that causes COVID-19, is not the first coronavirus humans have encountered. Scientists are currently aware of you are coronavirus that make humans sick. Four of them cause the common cold, which is almost exclusively a benign disease of the upper respiratory tract, and the other two – SARS and MERS – are much more deadly.
While the two deadly ones were largely contained or eliminated, and never really spread around the world with the same speed and magnitude as SARS-CoV-2, the other four strains have become endemic in most places in the world. world – they regularly make their way through populations, spreading easily enough that they cannot simply be contained.
A systematic review
For the study, the researchers used the characteristics of the four endemic coronaviruses to model what SARS-CoV-2 might look like years after its explosion. One of the main features they looked at was the severity of the disease in children. Young children, under the age of five, typically have strong immune systems and usually have their first encounter with a common cold as well. Over time, the more they are exposed to viruses, the better their immune response and the less severe the cases they get. By the time they are older adults, they have encountered the virus so many times that their immune systems can handle it. In the case of this pandemic, however, the virus was new to everyone, and because the immune system weakens with age, older adults are much more vulnerable to COVID-19.
The study predicts that at the end of the pandemic, when most people have been exposed to the virus (hopefully more through vaccination than direct infection), the new coronavirus could eventually become an endemic virus. A virus similar to those that cause the common cold, which will mainly affect children under five. In summary: it will have the shape of a relatively benign insect.
Nobody has a crystal ball, but…
It is obviously impossible to predict what will happen in the future, but some current data supports this model. For starters: as wonderful as the new mRNA vaccines are, none of them are 100% effective at preventing COVID-19.
Come reported by Popular Science the last month, it may still be possible that someone is vaccinated and immune to COVID-19, but still carries the virus and spreads it.
It wouldn't be that far-fetched to have a vaccine that protects you from developing the worst effects of Covid, but you could be infected and you could spread it without getting sick
Jeffrey Bethony, professor of microbiology, immunology, and tropical medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences
In late-stage clinical trials, both Moderna and Pfizer's vaccines were 100% effective at preventing severe forms of COVID-19, showing that exposure to the coronavirus results in a less severe attack of the disease if you were to encounter it again the virus later. Additional support comes from reinfection rates. While researchers are still studying how common it is to get COVID-19 twice, it appears to be relatively rare, and when it does occur, the second cases are generally milder than the first.
Understanding long-term COVID-19 immunity, whether from infection or vaccine, will take at least a couple of years.
While there is currently good data to suggest that immunity lasts up to eight months, no one knows for sure. And how dangerous the virus will be in a few years depends largely on our overall immune response to it.
