Experts say it’s likely that some version of the disease will linger for years. But what it will look like in the future is less clear.
Will the coronavirus, which has already killed more than 2 million people worldwide, eventually be eliminated by a global vaccination campaign, like smallpox? Will dangerous new variants evade vaccines? Or will the virus stick around for a long time, transforming into a mild annoyance, like the common cold?
Eventually, the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 will become yet “another animal in the zoo,” joining the many other infectious diseases that humanity has learned to live with, predicted Dr. T. Jacob John, who studies viruses and was at the helm of India’s efforts to tackle polio and HIV/AIDS.
https://apnews.com/article/common-cold-india-coronavirus-pandemic-latin-america-infectious-diseases-9ff4108bb925762655b6f6e23ffcf500This question of what happens next attracted Jennie Lavine, a virologist at Emory University, who is co-author of a recent paper in Science that projected a relatively optimistic scenario: After most people have been exposed to the virus — either through vaccination or surviving infections — the pathogen “will continue to circulate, but will mostly cause only mild illness,” like a routine cold.
The 1918 flu pandemic could offer clues about the course of COVID-19. That pathogen was an H1N1 virus with genes that originated in birds, not a coronavirus. At the time, no vaccines were available. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that a third of the world’s population became infected. Eventually, after infected people either died or developed immunity, the virus stopped spreading quickly. It later mutated into a less virulent form, which experts say continues to circulate seasonally.
“Very commonly the descendants of flu pandemics become the milder seasonal flu viruses we experience for many years,” said Stephen Morse, who studies viruses at Columbia University.
