As the coronavirus continues to spread rapidly throughout the U.S. and beyond, many are wondering: How on earth will this end? In an interview televised this week, President Trump reiterated his belief that sooner or later the virus will burn itself out. “I will be right eventually,” the president told Fox News host Chris Wallace. “It’s going to disappear, and I’ll be right.”
But scientists are increasingly of the view that this virus will not disappear. In interviews and correspondence with more than a dozen researchers around the world, NPRfound that the vast majority believes the virus will persist at some level for a long time in places like the U.S. and Europe.
And until there is an effective vaccine in widespread use, levels of immunity will never be high enough to achieve what’s called herd immunity, these researchers say. That’s the tipping point at which the disease begins to burn itself out because so many people are immune that it can’t continue to spread.
These scientists’ view that the virus will persist is based on growing evidence that immunity may not be as straightforward as first assumed and that the virus is spreading relatively slowly, while continuing to sicken and kill. A vaccine could still prevent the illness or reduce its severity, but it’s likely even that won’t wipe COVID-19 from the globe.
“I think it’s going to be with us probably forever at this point,” says Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh. “It’s going to be with us, and it’s how we decide to live with it.”
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The main reason herd immunity hasn’t been achieved, she suspects, is that to get there, many millions of Swedes would have to catch COVID-19. That could happen in the abstract, but in reality, most individuals deliberately try their hardest to avoid contracting the disease. “Nobody wants to be part of the herd,” she says.
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“I think if you were to just let this process occur, it’s very difficult to project the number of deaths, but I think we’re certainly talking north of a million, probably much more,” says Dr. Joshua Schiffer, an associate professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.”We know very little about the long-term effects for people with mild disease,” Bauer says. “We don’t know if the virus survives in reservoirs in the body, we don’t know if it can cause disease later in life, and that’s the really difficult part for decision-making.””I think if you were to just let this process occur, it’s very difficult to project the number of deaths, but I think we’re certainly talking north of a million, probably much more,” says Dr. Joshua Schiffer, an associate professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
As a practical matter, the U.S. health care system would buckle while trying to care for that many sick people, says Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, who directs the Special Pathogens Unit at Boston Medical Center. “It’s unlikely we can achieve natural herd immunity without completely using up physical and human resources,” she tells NPR.
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Those nations have suppressed the virus through an initial lockdown, coupled with sustained contact tracing and isolation of sick individuals. That approach, combined with some social distancing and widespread use of masks, can quash the virus to levels where normal life can more or less resume — as long as elected officials, public health leaders and the public continue after that to work in concert to contain any outbreaks.