The Coronavirus Is Never Going Away

 

The Coronavirus Is Never Going Away

No matter what happens now, the virus will continue to circulate around the world.

SARAH ZHANG   AUGUST 4, 2020  The Atlantic Magazine (abbreviated)

The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has sickened more than 16.5 million people across six continents.  It is raging in countries that never contained the virus.  It is resurging in many of the ones that did.  If there was ever a time when this coronavirus could be contained, it has probably passed.  One outcome is now looking almost certain:  This virus is never going away.

The coronavirus is simply too widespread and too transmissible.  The most likely scenario, experts say, is that the pandemic ends at some point—because enough people have been either infected or vaccinated—but the virus continues to circulate in lower levels around the globe.  Cases will wax and wane over time.  Outbreaks will pop up here and there.  Even when a much-anticipated vaccine arrives, it is likely to only suppress but never completely eradicate the virus. (For context, consider that vaccines exist for more than a dozen human viruses but only one, smallpox, has ever been eradicated from the planet, and that took 15 years of immense global coordination.)  We will probably be living with this virus for the rest of our lives.

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With a virus, there is a general trade-off between how contagious it is and how deadly it is.  SARS and SARS-CoV-2 are illustrative points of comparison: The earlier virus killed a much higher proportion of patients, but it also did not spread as easily.  And what a virus ultimately wants to do is keep spreading, which is much easier to do from a live, walking host than a dead one.  “In the grand scheme of things, you know, a dead host doesn't help the virus,” says Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch.  The other four coronaviruses may also be less deadly because we have all encountered them as children, and even if our immunity does not prevent us from getting them again, it may still prevent severe disease.  All of this, along with immunity from vaccines, means that COVID-19 is likely to become far less disruptive down the line.

Influenza might be another useful point of comparison.  The “flu” is not one virus but actually several different strains that circulate seasonally.  After pandemics like 2009’s H1N1 flu, also known as swine flu, the pandemic strain does not simply disappear. Instead, it turns into a seasonal flu strain that circulates all year but peaks during the winter.  A descendent of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic strain is still the seasonal flu today. The seasonal peaks never quite reach pandemic heights because of building immunity in the population.  Eventually, a new strain, against which people have no immunity, comes along and sparks a new pandemic, and then it becomes the new dominant seasonal strain.

In this way, the long-term outlook for COVID-19 might offer some hope for a return to normal.  “I think this virus is with us to the future,” Ruth Karron, a vaccine researcher at Johns Hopkins said.  “But so is influenza with us, and for the most part, flu doesn't shut down our societies.  We manage it.”

SARAH ZHANG is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/coronavirus-will-never-go-away/614860/