Coronavirus may still take five years to control, says WHO chief scientist O Dia

According to Soumya Swaminathan, contingency measures, mutations, and the discovery of an effective vaccine against covid-19 are some of the main factors that will determine how long the new coronavirus pandemic will be controlled. Chief scientist at the World Health Organization (WHO), said in a debate promoted by the Financial Times that it could take up to five years to control the virus.

“I would say that in an interval of four to five years we could control this,” Swaminathan said during the virtual conference. The scientist also explains that “there is no crystal ball” to predict the covid-19 contingency, but that a vaccine is still the best way out for now. Nor does it rule out the possibility that the pandemic will worsen further, having caused nearly 300,000 deaths and infected more than 4.3 million people worldwide.

On his social media, Soumya Swaminathan emphasized that the five-year period could be shorter, if the vaccine was discovered in time and distributed globally. But the development process is still being studied and tested in several countries. “It is very difficult to predict. If global solidarity results in vaccines and treatment for all, the situation could be very different in two years,” he said.

Still, Swaminathan emphasized that even the vaccine would not be a fully effective route, since the virus can undergo genetic mutations and invalidate the efficiency and safety of what has been developed so far. For the scientist, the greatest challenge for governments now is to assess the risks and benefits of gradually reducing measures of social isolation to discover how to achieve a new normal.

On the 24th, WHO launched a partnership with several world leaders for an international collaboration on the discovery of a covid-19 vaccine. At that time, the Brazilian government did not send a representative and was left out of the agreement.