Eventually the coronavirus will be like the common cold

A study published yesterday predicts that COVID-19 will ultimately be just another endemic virus that circulates in the population but rarely makes anyone seriously ill. How quickly we get to this point will depend on how quickly we roll out the vaccination.

“The time it takes to get to this type of endemic condition depends on how quickly the disease spreads and how quickly the vaccination is rolled out,” said Jennie Lavine, postdoctoral fellow at Emory University in Atlanta. , who led the study …

While all of these coronaviruses produce a similar immune response, the new virus is most similar to the endemic common cold coronaviruses, hypothesized Dr. Lavine and her colleagues.

The viruses that cause colds have already spread around the world. Most people are first exposed to these viruses as children when their immune response is strong. And over time, people get reinfected and their immune response to the cold virus gets stronger. The reason the coronavirus is so deadly is that it is essentially a new virus that hits the immune system of the elderly who are less able to fight it off. If they had encountered the same virus as the children and developed resistance, they wouldn’t be so sick now.

Another possible scenario, where the vaccine completely prevents the spread of the virus until it subsides, is less likely in this case:

“I completely agree with the general intellectual construction of the article,” said Shane Crotty, virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology in San Diego.

If the vaccines stop people from spreading the virus, “it looks a lot more like the measles scenario, where you vaccinate everyone, including children, and you don’t really see the virus infecting people anymore,” he said. Dr Crotty.

Vaccines are more plausible to prevent disease – but not necessarily infection and transmission, he added. And that means the coronavirus will continue to circulate.

If the study’s authors are correct, it will take a year or maybe a few to get there, but ultimately COVID will just be some sort of background noise to most people’s health. When your little one catches a cold, he will be COVID and he will shrug his shoulders and this early exposure will protect him later. In fact, the story mentions a theory that a deadly pandemic that killed a million people in 1890 was caused by one of the four coronaviruses that cause colds. This epidemic ended when people developed a natural resistance.

However, there is a third possibility. The Times quotes Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard School of Public Health as suggesting that it’s possible the coronavirus could turn out to be more like the seasonal flu, meaning something that has good years and bad years. “Their prediction of becoming like cold coronaviruses is where I would put a lot of my money,” Lipsitch said, but added, “But I don’t think that’s absolutely guaranteed.”