How do you stop a virus?

How do you stop a virus? – Angela Gaganis, year 1, Adelaide

There is a scene in the movie “Wreck It Ralph” where Sergeant Calhoun describes some of the bad guys, called “Cy-Bugs”.

Calhoun says that “Cy-Bugs are like a virus … All they know is to eat, kill, multiply.” She goes on to say “viruses don’t stop!”

Well, they? It’s a great question, Angela.

It can get confusing when some people, like the President of the United States, say that this new COVID virus will go away on its own.

The short answer is that while some viruses gradually disappear, most viruses do not just “disappear.”

Viruses are really smart at finding ways to hide, just waiting for an opportunity to return.

Some viruses disappear

You may already know that some viruses give us the flu. You may not know that all the flu viruses that infected humans until about 120 years ago have disappeared (or are “extinct,” as scientists say). Some more recent ones have also disappeared.

For example, the virus that caused a terrible flu outbreak in 1957, which killed about 100,000 people in the United States, has now disappeared.

A virus that caused a horrible disease called “Spanish flu” is another good example. In 1918, this virus caused an outbreak of disease around the world (a pandemic), and sadly, many people died. The virus continued to appear in some places until 1921.

But by then, many people were immune to it, because their bodies had learned to fight it. This meant that it did not continue to spread like a pandemic, but simply appeared here and there.

Because of this, the strain that caused the pandemic mostly disappeared.

So can we also get rid of the COVID virus?

Sometimes we try to make a virus go extinct on purpose. We generally use vaccines (sometimes called “needles” or “shots”) to do that. A vaccine helped us get rid of a virus called smallpox, which used to be one of the most terrifying diseases in the world.

Hopefully, the vaccines will also kill viruses called polio and measles.

Scientists are doing everything they can to make a COVID vaccine. In fact, we could end up with more than one type of vaccine to fight the COVID virus.

If we get them, they will help a lot, but they may not stop the virus completely. This means that some people would still be infected, although not nearly as many people as before.

Read more: The original Sars virus disappeared – here’s why the coronavirus won’t do the same

The situation is a bit similar to another new disease, called swine flu, which appeared about 11 years ago. It was different from other strains of flu, so it spread widely and became a pandemic. The same has happened now with COVID.

About one person in ten people in the world contracted the swine flu virus before scientists could make a vaccine.

After a year, the vaccine had arrived and fewer and fewer people were contracting swine flu. The swine flu virus did not go away, it was still hiding ready to infect people. But because we had a vaccine, not many people got sick.

How and when will COVID end?

SARS is a virus similar to COVID. It was identified in 2003 and infected more than 8,000 people. But since 2004, it has not been seen in humans again.

We got rid of it by doing a mix of different things. This included isolation and quarantine, which you may know as “iso”.

We are using similar measures to combat COVID. So why did they work to stop SARS, but haven’t got rid of COVID yet?

One big problem is that COVID can spread without someone feeling sick. This means that you can pass it on even if you don’t have a cough or runny nose.

For this reason, some scientists say that we will never be able to make the COVID virus disappear completely.

Instead, it probably turns into an illness that makes some people sick every year, like the flu. It is almost certain that it will be with us for a long time, even after the pandemic has passed.

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