When will it finally end? This is the question of many minds after a year of living through Covid-19 pandemic.
But public health experts say we have an answer and you won’t like it: COVID-19 will never end. Now it seems ready to become an endemic disease – one that is always a part of our environment, no matter what we do.
“We have been told that this virus will go away. But it will not,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and medical director of the National Infectious Diseases Foundation, told CBS News.
“We need to control it. We need to reduce its impact. But it will be around to disturb 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 infected 118 million people worldwide and killed more than 2.6 million, including more than 530,000 Americans, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
At the same time, more effective COVID vaccines they have developed at an unprecedented rate and have already been administered to nearly 330 million people worldwide.
But researchers say there is simply no experience in completely eradicating infectious diseases, and everything about COVID-19 shows that it will not be any different.
“The more infectious a microbe is, 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 that we might end up playing some kind of cat and mouse game.”
Before COVID, people were already used to living with endemic diseases. The flu is an example. Measles is different. Both continue to spread and kill people each year, despite decades of vaccination and isolation.
Even the virus that causes COVID-19 is just a new type of coronavirus; other coronaviruses have been circulating for some time and, in some cases, could cause the common cold. COVID itself has already undergone mutations that have made it more contagious and potentially more deadly.
The only infectious disease in modern history that has been eradicated worldwide has been smallpox, which the World Health Organization declared eradicated in 1980. But it has been nearly 200 years since the first smallpox vaccine was created. Smallpox also spread relatively slowly, and people who had it developed a distinct rash, making the disease easier to identify and control.
Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus is extremely contagious, causing many asymptomatic infections at the same time. You can’t look at someone and see if they have the virus. COVID-19 has also been shown to be widespread in animals and humans, with confirmed infections in tigers, gorillas, monkeys, mink, cats and dogs.
Scientists say that all this makes the virus essentially impossible to control.
“It’s quite unrealistic to believe 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 get vaccinated – either for medical reasons or out of personal opposition to the vaccine – the world will always have “pockets of the population in which the virus continues to spread and be susceptible.”
But doctors say that the fact that COVID is here to stay does not mean that it will disrupt our lives as much as last year. Vaccination and isolation measures will eventually bring the pandemic under control, potentially turning COVID into another disease 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 each year – and yet it has become so familiar that many people don’t even bother to get vaccinated for it every year.
“Could it be on the way that we become so familiar with COVID that we develop a certain nonchalance about it as well?” he says. “Yes. We tend to do that in the United States.”
Schaffner says it would be best to give up the idea of returning to normal, and instead conform to the “new normal” in which COVID continues to shape our lives.
COVID vaccinations could become an annual ritual for millions. Masks may remain common for the elderly and people with underlying conditions. Your family holidays could be shaped by who is vaccinated, while more vulnerable people join only through Zoom.
“The third, fourth and fifth year of COVID shouldn’t be nearly as awful as the first,” he says. But in this new normal, “many of us will no longer be as careless as we once were.”