When is this finally going to end? That is the question that occupies many people after a year of living through the Covid-19 pandemic
But public health experts say we do have an answer, and you won’t like it: COVID-19 will never end. It now seems poised to become an endemic disease – one that is always part of our environment no matter what we do.
“We’ve been told this virus will go away. But it won’t,” says Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and medical director of the National Foundation For Infectious Diseases, told CBS News.
‘We have to keep it under control. We need to reduce its impact. But it will bother us in the near 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 people, including more than 530,000 Americans, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
At the same time, several effective COVID vaccines were developed at an unprecedented rate and have already been administered to nearly 330 million people around the world.
But researchers say there simply isn’t a track record of infectious diseases being eradicated completely, and everything about COVID-19 shows it won’t be any different.
“The more contagious a microbe is, the more difficult it is to control,” says Dr. Tom Frieden, the CEO of Resolve To Save Lives and a former CDC director, to CBS News. “COVID is very difficult to control, and the new variants suggest that we will eventually be 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 disperse 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 have been circulating for a long time and in some cases could cause colds. COVID itself has already undergone mutations that made it more contagious and potentially deadly.
The only infectious disease in modern history to be eradicated worldwide was smallpox, which the World Health Organization declared as eradicated in 1980. But that was nearly 200 years after the creation of the first smallpox vaccine. Smallpox also spread relatively slowly, and people who had it developed a characteristic rash, making the disease easier to identify and control.
The new coronavirus, meanwhile, is highly contagious and also causes many asymptomatic infections. You cannot look at someone and know if they have the virus. COVID-19 has also spread to both animals and humans, with confirmed infections in tigers, gorillas, monkeys, mink, cats and dogs.
Scientists say all of this makes the virus essentially impossible to fight.
“It is quite unrealistic to think that we can eliminate a virus from both the human population and its natural reservoirs,” said Dr. Anita McElroy of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine at CBS News.
She adds that since many people will choose not to get vaccinated – either for medical reasons or out of personal opposition to the vaccine – the world will always have “parts of the population where the virus continues to spread and become susceptible. is “.
But doctors say that just because COVID is here to stay doesn’t mean it will disrupt our lives as it did in the past year. Vaccination and containment measures will eventually bring the pandemic under control, potentially turning COVID into another disease we just 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 bother getting vaccinated for it every year.
“Could it be that we become so familiar with COVID along the way that we also develop a certain nonchalance about it?” he says. ‘Yes. We usually do that in the United States. ‘
Schaffner says it’s best to give up the idea of ”back to normal” and instead settle for the “new normal,” in which COVID continues to shape our lives.
COVID vaccinations can become an annual ritual for millions of people. Masks may remain common for the elderly and those with underlying conditions. Your family celebrations can be shaped by who got vaccinated, while more vulnerable people join in only through Zoom.
“The third, fourth and fifth years of COVID shouldn’t be nearly as awful as the first,” he says. But in this new normal, “many of us won’t be as carefree as we used to be.”