When is this going to end? That is the question on the minds of many after living one year later Nationwide epidemic of Kovid-19.
But public health experts say we have the answer, and you won’t like it: Covid-19 will never run out. Now it is thought to be a local disease – it is always a part of our environment, no matter what we do.
“We’ve been told the virus will disappear, but it won’t,” CBS News was quoted as saying by a professor at the Wonderbilt University School of Medicine and the medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. William Schaefner tells CBS News.
“We need to keep it under control. We need to minimize its impact. But it will continue to haunt us for the foreseeable future. And that means – years.”
The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 an epidemic on March 11, 2020. One 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 the same time, Several effective covid vaccines Was developed at an unprecedented pace and has already managed about 330 million people worldwide.
But researchers say there is no track record of completely eradicating infectious diseases, and all the facts about COVID-19 show that it will be no different.
Dr. Tom Frieden, CEO of Resolve to Save Lives and former director of the CDC, tells CBS News, “It is as difficult as a microbe to control a more contagious disease. “” Covid is very challenging to control, and the new variants suggest we’ll be able to play a cat and mouse game. ”
Before Kovid, people were already accustomed to living with local diseases. The flu is an example. Measles is another. Both continue to spread and kill people every year despite decades of vaccination and control.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is also a new type of coronavirus; Other coronaviruses have been circulating for a long time and in some cases can cause a common cold. The covid itself has undergone mutations that make it more contagious and potentially dangerous.
It is the only infectious disease in modern history to be eradicated worldwide, which was declared eradicated in 1980 by the World Health Organization. But that was about 200 years after the first smallpox vaccine was developed. Smallpox also spreads relatively slowly, and those who developed specific spots made it easier to identify and control the disease.
The novel coronavirus, meanwhile, is highly contagious while also causing many asymptomatic infections. You can’t look at someone and know if they have a virus. COVID-19 has been shown to spread to animals as well as humans, confirming the infection in tigers, gorillas, clowns, bananas, Minks, Cats and dogs.
Scientists say that this makes it essentially impossible to control all these viruses.
“It is very unrealistic to believe that we can remove both the human population and its natural reservoirs,” Dr. Anita McClaro, of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, told CBS News.
He adds that many people would choose not to be vaccinated – for medical reasons or because of personal opposition to the vaccine – the world will always have “population pockets where the virus spreads and becomes susceptible.”
But just because doctors are here to stay has not meant that it will disrupt our lives as much as it has in the past year. Vaccination and control measures will eventually bring the epidemic under control, turning potential COVID into another disease we live with.
Schaefner said the flu is a serious threat – it infects millions of Americans and kills tens of thousands every year – and it has become so familiar that many people do not even bother to get vaccinated every year.
“Could it be down the road that we become so familiar with COVID that we even develop some ambiguity about it?” He says. “Yes. We tend to do that in the United States.”
Schaffner says it would be nice to give up the idea of going “back to the normal”, and instead settle into the “new normal” where the covid shapes our lives.
Covid vaccination can be an annual ritual for millions of people. Masks may be common for the elderly and those with underlying conditions. Your family celebration can be shaped by who vaccinated, while the more sensitive ones just connect by zooming.
“Covid’s third, fourth and fifth year, shouldn’t be close to what wasn’t as horrible as the first year,” he says. But in this new normal state, “many of us will no longer be as careless as before.”
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