Will the Coronavirus Ever Go Away? Here's What One of the WHO's Top Experts Thinks

[Bayard]

Dr. Bruce Aylward has almost 30 years experience in fighting polio, Ebola and other diseases, and now, he’s turned his attention to stopping the spread of COVID-19.

Aylward, the senior adviser to the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), is one of the world’s top officials in charge of fighting the coronavirus pandemic.

The doctor, who lead a joint WHO mission to China in February to study the effectiveness of the coronavirus response in the country, has seen firsthand the measures Beijing took to fight the virus. Now he’s sharing what he learned with governments and communicating with the WHO response teams working to fight COVID-19 in virus epicenters around the globe.

In an extensive teleconference interview with TIME from his office in Geneva, Aylward shared what he thinks needs to be done to stop the pandemic, and what the future might hold.

The following excerpts from the conversation have been condensed and edited for clarity.

https://time.com/5805368/will-coronavirus-go-away-world-health-organization/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=health_covid-19&linkId=84865574

Good info at link

[cilla4progress]

1. Can you sum up

his answer to the question in your OP till we have time to read?

Thanks!

[Mike 03]

2. It's a great read. Here's an important bit:

Do you expect COVID-19 to continue to spread?

We can get little glimpses into the future from places that are recently getting infected, places that aren’t infected, but also the places where it all started. And if you go back and look at China right now, they [identified the virus] in early January, they had a full on response, sort of threw everything at it, and it’s middle of March now and they estimate maybe end of March they’ll be coming out of it, so a full three months.

When you look around the world in Europe, North America, the Middle East, you can see that we’re really at the period of exponential growth, we’re still seeing the virus going up very, very rapidly, even in hard hit places like Italy, for example. These countries still have months of this challenge in front of them.

When you look to other parts of the world, like Africa, for example, and parts of the Indian subcontinent you can see that it’s just beginning. Even though they have very, very few cases, if you look carefully at that curve, it’s also in a phase of exponential growth.

What do you think the coronavirus pandemic will look like six months from now?

I expect we will be emerging—still with disease in various parts of the world—but we should be emerging from a bad wave of this disease across a large swathe of the planet. The challenge is we’re going to be back into the flu season. And one of the big questions is, are we going to see a surge of it again at that period?

Looking further into the future, what do you anticipate? Will COVID-19 ever disappear?

What it looks like is that we’re going to have a substantial wave of this disease right through basically the globe unless something very different happens in the southern hemisphere. And the question then is: What’s going to happen? Is this going to disappear completely? Are we going to get into a period of cyclical waves? Or are we going to end up with low level endemic disease that we have to deal with? Most people believe that that first scenario where this might disappear completely is very, very unlikely, it just transmits too easily in the human population, so more likely waves or low level disease.

A lot of that is going to depend on what we as countries, as societies, do. If we do the testing of every single case, rapid isolation of the cases, you should be able to keep cases down low. If you simply rely on the big shut down measures without finding every case, then every time you take the brakes off, it could come back in waves. So that future frankly, may be determined by us and our response as much as the virus.

[Igel]

5. Most likely in the background.

With herd immunity keeping it in check.

Consider that we've mostly tested sick people for COVID-19. And over 86% of them (as of the Covid Tracking Project's numbers from a minute ago) were negative. That means a lot of sick people don't have COVID-19, and most won't have "the flu"--even though there are a number a flu viruses in circulation at any given time. They'll have one or more colds or other viruses.

To peel out SARS-CoV-2 as a special case, every person who gets sick with anything flu like would first have at COVID test, then a flu test. Too much work, too many holes in the program. It'll become endemic at a low level.

It doesn't kill like measles, and it's not easily identifiable. Viruses that came in waves killed in high numbers, left a lot of immunity behind, but were identifiable. Got measles? Any idiot can ID that, impose quarantine and track back a day or two to find those who might have been infected--and avoid the miscreants who reject quarantine. The wave can be squashed. Got COVDi-19? Good luck IDing that. Or treating every cold and flu case as COVID.

[Mike 03]

3. Here's another interesting bit:

There are reports of people dying of coronavirus who are otherwise healthy. What have your teams seen in terms of who the virus is killing?

One of the things that terrifies me now is, as this is spread in the west is, there’s this sense of invulnerability among millennials. And absolutely not. Ten percent of the people who are in [intensive care units] in Italy are in their 20s, 30s or 40s. These are young, healthy people with no co-morbidities, no other diseases.

We don’t understand why some young healthy people progress to severe disease and even die and others don’t. We don’t have clear predictors.

[Igel]

6. And yet the claim is that they're at much lower risk.

Of it being serious, and of dying.

The difference below "no" and "low" is apparently lost on the innumerate when they're young. Half the population accounts for 10% of the cases. Those younger account for a very small number. That means those in their late 50s and older account for the other 80% or more.

And the difference between "low" and "high" is apparently lost on the innumerate when they're older.

[Buns_of_Fire]

4. I thought it was gonna be Pete Townshend. nt