11/6/2022 0 Comments Future never end download link![]() ![]() “How do you begin to know the extent of virus spread outside of the human population and in wild and domestic animals?” he says. (SARS also originated in bats, with catlike palm civets serving as an intermediate host-which led officials to order the culling of thousands of civets.) Timothy Sheahan, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wonders if, with SARS-CoV-2 so widespread across the globe, humans might be infecting new species and creating new animal reservoirs. SARS-CoV-2 likely originated as a bat virus, with a still-unidentified animal perhaps serving as an intermediate host, which could continue to be a reservoir for the virus. You might get it every year or every other year, much like a flu shot.Įven if the virus were somehow eliminated from the human population, it could keep circulating in animals-and spread to humans again. Rather than a onetime deal, a COVID-19 vaccine, when it arrives, could require booster shots to maintain immunity over time. This has implications for a vaccine, too. “The faster protection goes away, the more difficult for any project to try to move toward eradication,” Grad told me. Antibodies to a handful of other coronaviruses that cause common colds fade in just a year. But related coronaviruses are reasonable points of comparison: In SARS, antibodies- which are one component of immunity- wane after two years. If immunity lasts closer to two years, COVID-19 could peak every other year.Īt this point, how long immunity to COVID-19 will last is unclear the virus simply hasn’t been infecting humans long enough for us to know. If immunity lasts only a few months, there could be a big pandemic followed by smaller outbreaks every year. Grad, an infectious-disease researcher at Harvard, and his colleagues have modeled a few possible trajectories. If not, then what does the future of COVID-19 look like? That will depend, says Yonatan Grad, on the strength and duration of immunity against the virus. “It’s very unlikely we’re going to be able to declare the kind of victory we did over SARS,” says Stephen Morse, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. The strategies that succeeded with SARS are less effective when some of the people who transmit COVID-19 don’t even know they are infected. SARS and SARS-CoV-2 differ in a crucial way, though: The new virus spreads more easily-and in many cases asymptomatically. SARS, a closely related coronavirus, emerged in late 2002 and infected more than 8,000 people but was snuffed out through intense isolation, contact tracing, and quarantine. Read: COVID-19 can last for several monthsīack in the winter, public-health officials were more hopeful about SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. (For context, consider that vaccines exist for more than a dozen human viruses but only one, smallpox, has ever been eradicated from the planet, and that took 15 years of immense global coordination.) We will probably be living with this virus for the rest of our lives. Even when a much-anticipated vaccine arrives, it is likely to only suppress but never completely eradicate the virus. The most likely scenario, experts say, is that the pandemic ends at some point-because enough people have been either infected or vaccinated-but the virus continues to circulate in lower levels around the globe. The coronavirus is simply too widespread and too transmissible. One outcome is now looking almost certain: This virus is never going away. If there was ever a time when this coronavirus could be contained, it has probably passed. ![]() It is resurging in many of the ones that did. ![]() It is raging in countries that never contained the virus. The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has sickened more than 16.5 million people across six continents. ![]()
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