Up to now, I haven’t blogged or commented on the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, largely because anything I had to say would be to simply repeat the already well-known, tried-and-true rules that everyone is familiar with: wear a mask, stay at least six feet apart (nine or ten would be even better), wash your hands, don’t touch your face, avoid large gatherings, etc., etc., etc. Those are the active things that everyone can do to minimize spread of the virus in the absence of a good vaccine or a good, solid herd immunity in the population.
As the pandemic continues, vaccine testing and production has begun and we should know in a few months whether any of the various candidate vaccines are safe and effective. A vaccine is the only thing that will eventually get us away from the tiresome rules of social distancing that we’ve had to use for the past nine months or so. Like most of us, I’m ready to get back to seeing my friends face-to-face, not just on a computer screen. I belong to several organizations and I would like to be able to participate fully in the goings-on of those organizations. I’m sure you do too.
The only thing that will ever get us back to near-normal is a vaccine. But what about the future of the disease? What will happen to COVID-19? Will it ever go away? Will we be rid of it? President Trump says after the election no one will mention it again. Horse manure. Dr. Fauci thinks it may eventually go away. I say that’s not likely either.
A good vaccine (or several vaccines) will help control the spread of the virus, like any vaccine should. We still have several diseases, influenza and measles, specifically, that are still around in spite of vaccines that can control the spread of the viruses that cause them. But two factors have helped allow those two viruses to continue to spread in the population. One, in the case of influenza, is that the vaccines are not very effective. Flu vaccine effectiveness has been as low as 20%, though in most cases it is better than that. (That’s due largely to the tendency of the virus to change from year to year, confounding the drug companies that have to decide what viruses to put in the vaccine well in advance of the next wave of disease.) We could control flu better with a highly effective vaccine, sure.
Second, there is a substantial resistance to immunization in this country, and this is the major factor allowing measles to spread. In contrast to flu, measles vaccine is very effective. The only way to control a virus disease is to vaccinate a large portion of the population, and that’s not going to happen in the anti-vax climate of the US. I personally will take a COVID-19 vaccine if it is shown to be effective.
But what about longer-term? Will we ever be able to eradicate COVID-19 in the US like we did smallpox and polio? The two factors I mentioned above will have to be present, but there is a third factor. Both smallpox and polio are diseases strictly of humans. They do not occur in animals. There is no animal reservoir, so vaccinating humans stops the transmission because the virus has no place to go. Influenza and probably COVID-19 both originated in animals, and that may make it difficult, if not impossible, to eradicate. In my humble opinion, COVID-19 will probably settle down to the status of an endemic disease more like measles. Measles could be eradicated if vaccination rates were high enough, but politically, well, you know . . .
I think we’re going to have to put up with COVID-19 for a while. For many years, in fact. We may see annual waves of infection like flu, and children will have to have a COVID vaccination before school every year. But it’s not likely to go away any time soon.