So there’s no way to throw a net around Covid-19 and tighten it to zero; his animal guests always give him a chance to escape. However, it ‘s not really helpful to start thinking about other hosts so that everyone who has suffered from a disease is protected by a vaccine – and so far, we’re not close by. As long as people somewhere in the world are still waiting for their first pictures, Covid-19 will have human hosts to breed in. And also, perhaps, going around, creating the kind of changes that are now taking place across the globe.
That raises the possibility that, as the virus changes, we need to continue vaccinations to keep up. “I think most people feel that this is going to be something where for the next few years we are likely to get the Covid-19 vision,” said Alex Gorsky, Johnson & Johnson CEO. Johnson, earlier this month at a CNBC event. “Just what that picture will be, I don’t think we know today.”
If Covid cannot be a disease we try to squelch quickly – the way, for example, we dispense vaccines to combat the outbreak of Ebola – it must be a disease that is we design for it, such as measles and flu. With measles, we start vaccination in childhood. With the flu, we re-vaccinate every year, adjusting the content of the vaccine to keep up with viral evolution. We vaccinate against those who take such a tax. In the last 10 years, the flu has killed anywhere from 12,000 to 61,000 people each year in the U.S.; worldwide, measles kills 140,000 each year.
We have no guarantee that Covid-19, if endemic, becomes as severe as measles, or goes into something mild. Prior to the onset of the pandemic, there were six coronaviruses known to infect humans: the original SARS from 2003; MERS, which arose in 2012; and four that cause seasonal illnesses. These latter four, which are now considered endemic, account for about 25 percent of the cold we contract each winter, and they prove that some can coronaviruses being something we don’t like, but we don’t have to be afraid of. (However, they were not always mild. However, one of them was recently linked to a worldwide epilepsy in 1889 and 1890 of respiratory illness and brain disorders; it came down in history as ” Russian flu ”- but that was the name for the reason, since flu viruses were not recognized until 40 years later.)
A recent paper modeling the possible future of the novel coronavirus, written by postdoc Jennie Lavine of Emory University, seeks to predict the ways in which Covid might -19 future behaviors, based on data collected from the four endemic coronaviruses, as well as SARS and MERS. He finds that Covid-19 could reach the state that all four endemic strains now live, by consistently causing moderate infection – but that outcome will depend on how the circulatory disease behaves in children during their first illness, as these are the first diseases that set up the immune system to respond down the road.
That is the only action that vaccines perform, of course. Our bodies produce many different types of immunity in response to pathogens; it is too early, Lavine says, to gather the long-term data we need to determine whether both Covid-19 vaccines and childhood disease are protective in a way that prevents diseases any subsequent but moderate disease.
But accept, for now, that the virus does not become a mild disease such as a cold, but remains dangerous. That prospect makes it imperative to roll out the nationality of vaccines and spread doses worldwide as soon as possible, not only to protect people from illness, but to infect host viruses away where it can suffocate.