Will COVID-19 hurt us forever? Here’s what the experts say – Orange County Register

One epidemiologist predicts many years from now, when 2020 is a distant memory, a mask will still dangle from your rearview mirror.

“As long as any of your readers are alive, we will have some form of COVID,” said Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist and demographer at UC Irvine who has The crystal ball during the pandemic was amazingly accurate.

“That doesn’t mean we’re going to have half a million deaths a year and clog emergency departments. Things will settle down – mostly in the back of a million dead Americans who can’t die twice, who have lost their genetic lottery ticket and have some special cellular receptors that interact with this virus.

“But COVID will be here,” he said. “There won’t be a mask order from the government, but some people will wear masks dangling from their rearview mirrors for the rest of their lives.”

Like the excellent infectivity of the omicron variant send the number of cases skyrocketed, some semi-closed experts say it could push us more quickly from pandemic to pandemic – which translates to transforming from a fire emergency into an annoying background noise persistent.

Others scoffed.

“It’s pushing us more quickly into a raging pandemic with no guarantees,” said Dr John Swartzberg, emeritus clinical professor of infectious diseases and immunization at UC Berkeley. is approaching”.

“I don’t have enough arrogance to say it will be with us forever. However, it will stay with us for a long time but in what form (more cold, for example) is anyone’s guess.”

UCLA professor of medicine and epidemiology Dr. Timothy F. Brewer is nonetheless unlikely to make a meaningful difference between pandemic and endemic disease at this point in COVID-19.

“After 40 years, is HIV still a pandemic or an endemic disease?” Brewer asked. “How should or should we respond to HIV? What is clear is that, unlike SARS and MERS, SARS-CoV-2 is efficiently transmitted from person to person, which makes eradication difficult.”

Swartzberg of Berkeley hopes that, in the long run, vaccines will protect us from serious illness and we will accept getting colds because of it. “However,” he said, “I doubt I will ever use public transport again without wearing a mask.”

‘Like the flu’

Influenza is an endemic disease. That means it’s always there. The immunity is not strong enough to reject the virus as a host, but the vulnerability is not so great that it spreads like wildfire.

Richard Carpiano, a public health scientist and medical sociologist at UC Riverside, said the possibility of endemicity is possible with COVID-19, but when that will happen is not for everyone. predict.

“In general, prevalence can be attributed to a number of factors, such as high vaccination rates and prior infection that confer a significant amount of immunity in the population as well as lower transmission of the virus. . For COVID, however, the omicron variant is more infectious than earlier variants and is re-infecting people who had previously had COVID several months back.

“Similarly, studies show that our current vaccine is less effective against omicrons than other variants,” he said by email. “But worse, a significant portion of the globe is unvaccinated or unvaccinated, and response policies vary greatly in the United States and around the world. All in all, these are not good signs for the immediate endemicity of the coronavirus. ”

UCI’s Noymer entered a keyboard-to-keyboard battle with other experts early in the pandemic because they assumed COVID-19 would be like the flu.

He was sure it would be a much bigger threat. And lately, he’s puzzled to see so many experts doing the same thing, likening COVID-19 to the flu and treating endemicity as a safe, fun place.

“Endemic does not mean that COVID is just another flu. It means that COVID becomes endemic,” he said. “There will be 1 million deaths, whether or not, by the time this country’s second anniversary of COVID comes. The flu killed 60,000 Americans in a bad year. It’s horrible, 600,000 souls, but in the realm of horrible things, the flu really isn’t that bad. And so the argument that COVID is just another flu worries me. “

Swartzberg of Berkeley would agree. “Ask the more than 830,000 Americans who have died if this sounds like the flu,” says Swartzberg. “And what about people with ‘prolonged COVID’? Have you heard of the ‘long-lasting flu’? “

No long-term prediction

The virus is certainly not “just the flu,” Carpiano said.

The analogy could help people understand how COVID-19 could, at some point, become endemic in terms of case prevalence and year-to-year variability – that is, for the worse. years than everyone else – but think of the coronavirus as being like the flu in terms of infectivity and severity, he said.

“We are still learning what long-lasting health consequences of COVID affect a significant portion of people with COVID,” said Carpiano.

“If we know anything about COVID, it’s very difficult to predict what will happen in the short term – like this time next year. Sure, COVID will not be eradicated like smallpox, but as a general rule, no one should make long-term predictions.”