This is not guaranteed, but it looks more like the winter months could get cold, flu and COVID-19.
Vaccinations promise to deprive the new coronavirus by taming it so that it can not cause serious illness and death, or threaten the hospitals’ ability to treat patients.
Herd immunity can be achieved in a few months, but it is not easy to predict what will happen next.
Will COVID-19 ever disappear completely or is it here to stay?
Experts, including dr. Anthony Fauci, says it is likely to remain and become an endemic disease – one that regularly occurs at a predictable rate in a specific area, such as colds in North America or malaria in Africa – although it spreads much lower levels, yields milder symptoms and becomes much more manageable than when it first appeared.
“I doubt we’re going to eradicate it,” Fauci said in November.
When the journal Nature recently examined more than 100 immunologists, researchers and virologists for infectious diseases, 89% thought the new coronavirus would become endemic.
Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security in Baltimore and a spokeswoman for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, agreed.
“I never thought it would go away. It is an efficiently distributed respiratory virus derived from a family of viruses, four of which cause 25% of our colds. It is established in the human population, ”Adalja said TODAY.
‘But what’s going to happen is that it will no longer be able to kill people at the rate it is currently doing. It will still be here – we will still see matters, we will still have problems with them – but it will never be an emergency for public health as it is now. ‘
Adalja predicted that the new coronavirus would become the fifth seasonal coronavirus that humans come into contact with annually, although the damage it causes would be very limited.
What is the season when COVID-19 becomes seasonal?
This is likely to coincide with the cold and flu season: “Coronaviruses usually peak in the colder months,” Adalja said.
The U.S. did not see the seasonality in 2020 because there was so much spread of COVID-19 and so little immunity to it when summer arrived that the warmer weather did not have much impact, he added.
Will people need to get an annual COVID-19 vaccine, similar to an annual flu shot?
It has yet to be seen, with some experts tending to ‘yes’.
People may need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 annually for the next few years, Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky told CNBC. The company applied for emergency permission from its vaccine candidate this month.
“This virus shows an incredible ability to change, to change, to adapt in a sense to everything we set against it,” said dr. Richard Besser, a former acting director of the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said. the dr. John Torres, senior medical correspondent at NBC News, said.
Even if the current COVID-19 vaccines are found to be less effective in blocking infections of the South African and Brazilian variants, they can still prevent hospitalization and death, allowing them to function more like a flu vaccine to prevent serious diseases, Adalja noted.
Or it could be that one vaccine update is needed, and then the virus becomes more stable without the shot having to be constantly updated, he added.
But when it comes to the vaccine experience, it’s hard to compare it to what happens to flu, because flu and COVID-19 are completely different viruses, Adalja warned.
What will happen to testing, mask wear and restrictions?
Experts predicted that COVID-19 testing would become more routine, similar to the way doctors test people for flu. “I do not think you will see dedicated COVID-19 test sites after this season,” Adalja said.
Mask mandates are likely to disappear, but Americans are likely to continue to wear face masks during future cold and flu seasons – similar to what is happening in many Asian countries, he added. The virtually non-existent flu season 2020-2021 has shown how effective mask wearing and other precautions can be to stop viral spread.
After the vulnerable populations have been vaccinated for COVID-19 and hospitals are not worried about being overwhelmed, restrictions on restaurants, gyms and other businesses will be lifted, Adalja predicted. But many adjustments implemented during the crisis, such as better air filtration systems and improved sanitation, are likely to remain in place; and telework and telemedicine will continue to be popular.
“There are going to be a lot of changes in society as a result of the pandemic,” Adalja said.
