Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
Some experts estimate pandemic Covid-19 will end up being endemic and the world’s population will coexist with the virus.
“The expected continued circulation of SARS-CoV-2 contrasts with the first circulation of SARS in 2003 and with the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa in 2014, when public health measures finally halted the spread and ended both outbreaks,” said Associate Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases, Jonathan Grad, Melvin J. and Geraldine L. Glimcher, as quoted from the official website Harvard, Monday (23/8).
Melvin and Glimcher stated that it was difficult to predict when the Covid-19 pandemic would shift to the endemic stage. Because the virus spreads in various regions and it is likely that it will last a long time because of the frequent frequency of physical contact between humans.
“It depends on factors such as the strength and duration of immune protection from vaccination and natural infection, our patterns of contact with each other that allow for spread, and transmission of the virus,” they said.
According to the two researchers, pandemics generally begin with a higher death rate from infection than observed in the years following their emergence when the virus continues to circulate.
“While the decline in mortality rates after a pandemic may be due to a number of factors, one major possible contributor is that the first round of exposure to the pathogen provides some degree of protection against reinfection and severity of disease if reinfection does occur,” they said.
As reported ScienceAlert, Dr. Lee Riley of UC Berkeley highlighted one major obstacle to eliminating Covid-19: the virus that can mutate to become resistant to vaccines.
He said in places where there is a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, the vaccine could exert selective pressure on the virus to undergo further mutations. The new variant will later spread among people who are not vaccinated.
Some variants can also infect people who have been vaccinated.
According to Riley, another difficulty in achieving herd immunity is that some of the currently available vaccines do not provide 100% immunity against COVID-19 transmission.
Professor Graham Medley, an expert in disease modeling at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said endemic means that someone is always infected, transmits it to others and then recovers. Over a long period of time, each person infects one other person on average, so the number of those infected is roughly the same.
This is in stark contrast to the high rates of transmission we have seen during the pandemic.
(mhr / ayp)
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