After more than a year of living with the pandemic, one question somehow becomes more important than all the others. Will the new coronavirus ever disappear from our lives?
The answer to this question is not simple and, in fact, no one can answer it precisely. For example, scientists believe the new coronavirus will be with us for decades, but that doesn't mean it will pose the same threat as it did last year.
The new coronavirus appeared in late 2019 in China, but it is difficult to predict how it will behave in the long term. Many experts believe that over time, the disease caused by this virus, COVID-19, will eventually weaken to the level of a common cold. And this also represents the greatest hope.
Such a scenario is possible as people develop immunity over time either through infection or vaccination. Other viruses also followed a similar, quite comparable path. For example, the 1918 influenza pandemic offers insight into the possible course of the novel coronavirus pandemic and the COVID-19 virus.
The US CDC estimates that a third of the world's population was infected at the time by a virus that spread to humans from birds. But eventually the disease stopped spreading rapidly due to the fact that many people died from the effects of this flu or because they developed immunity to the virus. The virus later mutated into a less contagious form, which experts say is still circulating among the population today.
On the other hand, the emergence of new variants of COVID-19 could complicate matters if future mutations of the novel coronavirus are such that they cause a more severe form of the disease or evade the vaccine's effect.
Given the possibility of re-infection in people who have already had the disease or been vaccinated against it, it is unlikely to become extinct.
The only virus that has been eradicated from the human population is smallpox. The reason was that people developed long-term immunity to the virus after being infected or vaccinated.
Source: AP
