Dr. Osterholm: Americans will be living with the coronavirus for decades [View all]
MarketWatch
Published: July 31, 2020 at 6:08 a.m. ET
By Jaimy Lee
Dr. Michael Osterholm, epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, recognized the coronavirus would become a pandemic as early as January
... Osterholm’s viewpoint is sobering. The 67-year-old expects the novel coronavirus to be present for the rest of his life. He doesn’t believe the wave theory (a first wave, a lull, followed by other waves) will apply to this pandemic. “That’s not what’s happening here,” he told MarketWatch in an interview.
MarketWatch: I saw a piece in The Atlantic this week and I thought they positioned it well. They described it as the beginning of the end.
Osterholm: It won’t be. We will be dealing with this virus forever. Effective and safe vaccines and hopefully ones with some durability will be very important, even critical tools, in fighting it. But the whole world is going to be experiencing COVID-19 ‘til the end of time. We’re not going to be vaccinating our way out of this to eight-plus billion people in the world right now. And if we don’t get durable immunity, we’re potentially looking at revaccination on a routine basis, if we can do that. We’ve really got to come to grips with actually living with this virus, for at least my lifetime, and at the same time, it doesn’t mean we can’t do a lot about it.
... They’re not waves. We’ve never had a pandemic due to coronavirus before. We’ve had influenza pandemics. With an influenza pandemic, you do get true waves, meaning you get a first big peak of cases, then the numbers come down substantially without any human intervention...At this point, that’s not what’s happening here.
This is like a forest fire, full steam ahead. And wherever there’s human wood to burn, it’ll do it. What we see, though, are these spikes in cases where human mitigation strategies ended, or they’re not adhering to them ... This is just one constant pressure that’s occurring....
...is there durable immunity? Because herd immunity is based on the concept that once you have immunity, it stays. One of our goals has been to postpone as many cases we can until the vaccine is available and use that as your means for getting 50% to 70% of the population protected. But we don’t know what immunity means for either natural disease or vaccine. Herd immunity is still, in some ways, that theoretical state to get to but we’re not sure we ever will.
More here.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/osterholm-americans-will-be-living-with-the-coronavirus-for-decades-2020-07-30
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