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Coronavirus may never go away, even with a vaccine - The Washington Post
May 27, 2020 2 mins, 47 secs
But experts in epidemiology, disaster planning and vaccine development say embracing that reality is crucial to the next phase of America’s pandemic response.

And many experts think this virus will become the fifth — its effects growing milder as immunity spreads and our bodies adapt to it over time.

For now, though, most people have not been infected and remain susceptible.

“This virus is here to stay,” said Sarah Cobey, an epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago.

A vaccine — while crucial to our response — is not likely to eradicate the disease, experts say.

Everything we’re doing is just a knee-jerk response to the short-term,” said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

People also keep talking of returning to normal, said Natalie Dean, a disease biostatistician at the University of Florida.

All that effort was supposed to buy us time to think, plan and prepare, said Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness.

With hundreds of cities and counties reopening, think of each as a mini laboratory yielding valuable data on what will work against the virus in coming years.

But most still lack the tools to capture that data, said Cobey, the University of Chicago epidemiologist, whose models have been used by Illinois leaders.

It blows my mind that we still don’t have it,” Cobey said.

What’s needed are more sophisticated testing strategies, say experts, that could serve as canaries in the coal mine — increasing our speed and ability to detect surges in the virus.

“You need testing strategies that allow you to put on brakes quickly enough to stop surges,” said Cobey, who has pleaded with state leaders to implement such strategies.

Another idea researchers have proposed is universally testing pregnant women to measure the asymptomatic spread of the virus — among people who have been infected but don’t show symptoms.

There’s an assumption among many leaders, experts say, that increases in depression and anxiety are a temporary problem that will eventually disappear along with the virus.

Eventually, many experts believe this coronavirus could become relatively benign, causing milder infections as our immune systems develop a memory of responses to it through previous infection or vaccination.

But that process could take years, said Andrew Noymer, a University of California at Irvine epidemiologist.

Roughly 60 to 80 percent of the world’s population needs to be inoculated to reach herd immunity — that point when enough people have become resistant to a virus that it has difficulty spreading widely.

“As soon as the crisis is over, people will go back to whatever is the new normal and they will move on.”.

The struggle to get people to think long-term, of course, is not new to public health.

“The problem is people putting the present ahead of the future,” said Frieden, who led the CDC from 2009 to 2017.

“We found a way to show them their future selves,” said Frieden, now president and CEO of a health initiative called Resolve to Save Lives.

Increasingly, leading experts believe many Americans won’t make the shift toward long-range thinking until the virus spreads more widely and affects someone they know.

“Contrast that with people who have lost someone to drunk driving,” he said?

Eventually, everyone is going to know someone who got infected or died from this virus.

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