[ad_1]
When will it finally end? This is the question that preoccupies many minds after a year of living Covid-19 pandemic.
But public health experts say we’ve got an answer, and you’re not going to like it: COVID-19 is never going to stop. It now appears to be on the way to becoming an endemic disease – a disease that is always part of our environment, no matter what we do.
“We were told this virus was going to go away. But it won’t,” Dr. William Schaffner, professor in the faculty of medicine at Vanderbilt University and medical director of the National Foundation for Human Disease, told CBS News. Infectious diseases.
“We have to control it. We have to reduce its impact. But it is going to harass us for the foreseeable 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 has infected 118 million people worldwide and killed more than 2.6 million people, including more than 530,000 Americans, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
At a time, several effective COVID vaccines have been developed at an unprecedented rate and have already been administered to nearly 330 million people around the world.
But researchers say there is simply no history of complete eradication of infectious diseases, and everything about COVID-19 shows it won’t be any different.
“The more infectious a microbe, the harder it is to control,” Dr. Tom Frieden, CEO of Resolve To Save Lives and former director of the CDC, told CBS News. “COVID is very difficult to control, and the new variants suggest we may end up playing some kind of cat-and-mouse game.”
Before COVID, people were already used to living with endemic diseases. The flu is one example. Measles is another. The two continue to spread and kill people every year despite decades of vaccination and lockdown.
Even the virus that causes COVID-19 is just a new type of coronavirus; other coronaviruses had been circulating for a long time and, in some cases, could cause the common cold. COVID itself has already undergone mutations that have made it more contagious and potentially deadly.
The only infectious disease in modern history to be eliminated from the world is smallpox, which the World Health Organization declared eradicated in 1980. But that was almost 200 years after the creation of the first smallpox vaccine. Smallpox also spread relatively slowly, and people who had it developed a distinctive rash, which made the disease easier to identify and control.
The new coronavirus, meanwhile, is highly contagious while also causing many asymptomatic infections. You cannot look at someone and find out if they have the virus. COVID-19 has also been shown to spread to animals as well as humans, with infections confirmed in tigers, gorillas, monkeys, aim, cats and dogs.
Scientists say that all of this makes the virus virtually impossible to control.
“It is quite unrealistic to think that we can eliminate a virus from both the human population and its natural reservoirs,” Dr. Anita McElroy of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine told CBS News.
She adds that since many people will choose not to be vaccinated – whether for medical reasons or as personal opposition to the vaccine – the world will always have “pockets of populations where the virus continues to spread and be vulnerable. “.
But doctors say just because COVID is here to stay, doesn’t mean it’s going to disrupt our lives as much as it has in the past year. Vaccination and containment measures will eventually bring the pandemic under control, potentially turning COVID into another disease that we are simply learning 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’s become so familiar that many people don’t even bother to get vaccinated every year.
“Would it be later that we became so familiar with COVID that we developed some nonchalance about it as well?” he says. “Yes. We tend to do that in the United States.”
Schaffner says it would be best to ditch the idea of “getting back to normal” and instead settling into the “new normal” where COVID continues to shape our lives.
COVID vaccinations could become an annual ritual for millions of people. Masks may remain commonplace for the elderly and those with underlying illnesses. Your family’s celebrations can be shaped by those vaccinated, while those most vulnerable only join Zoom.
“The third, fourth and fifth years of COVID shouldn’t be as horrible as the first,” he says. But in this new normal, “many of us will not be as carefree as before.”
[ad_2]
Source link