The sense of an ending: The two ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic can end

Could the COVID-19 vaccine end up becoming something like the seasonal flu vaccine, requiring people to be vaccinated every year? Scientists don’t rule that out.
Sumeet Kaul
It’s a question the world is asking: When – and how -- will this pandemic end? The answer is not simple, and it depends on which expert you speak to. But the overall medical consensus appears to be that a real end to the COVID-19 outbreak will have to wait till a vaccine is developed.
But that immediately raises a host of questions. First, what if we don’t get a vaccine or if we don’t get one in the next few years? That is not such a remote possibility. Remember HIV-AIDS still does not have a vaccine though the disease has been around for 40 years.
Secondly, what if the vaccine is not very effective? Again, this is very much in the realm of possibility. In fact, no vaccine is 100 per cent effective. One of the most effective vaccines out there is the measles vaccine, which is known to be 97 per cent effective. People who get two doses of the vaccine are protected from measles for life.
If a similar vaccine for COVID-19 is developed by, say, the spring of 2021, the world would have hit a jackpot – and it would signal the end of the pandemic, once the logistics of vaccinating the world’s 8 billion people are tackled.
But more realistically speaking, we might be looking at a vaccine which is 75 per cent effective. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious disease expert, said last week that he would “settle” for a Covid-19 vaccine that is 70 to 75 per cent effective.
The thing is the coronavirus could be mutating in ways that would make any new vaccine possibly ineffective after a six-month period. We know that the influenza flu shot that millions of Americans take every year lasts only for that season, and people are encouraged to take it every year. In fact, it is even called the ‘seasonal’ flu vaccine.
Could the COVID-19  vaccine then end up being something like the seasonal flu vaccine, requiring people to be vaccinated every year? Researchers don’t rule that out.
From the point of view of the virus, ‘success’ would mean becoming as common as the common flu, so that it can pass on from host to host every year, year after year. For the more immediate future – the rest of 2020 – we can only hope that the combination of social distancing (which will keep the most vulnerable among us safe) and partial herd immunity will cause the virus to circulate less and less on its own. But the dangers of sudden outbreaks in pockets will continue.
The second type of ending
All of the possibilities mentioned above are to do with the physical or medical endgame of the pandemic. But medical historians and experts who have studied past pandemics tell us that there is also another type of ending – the “social” ending.
This is a fascinating concept and essentially implies that the population (or a large section of it) are no longer afraid of the virus, or tired of the disruption to their lives, and get back to business as usual. Such a phenomenon was seen in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, with people desperate to get back to normalcy after the combined trauma of World War 1 and the outbreak (the latter killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide). But it appears that the Spanish Flu ended socially and medically at around the same time, allowing people -- at least those not under colonial rule -- to quickly return to a productive economic and social life. 
With the coronavirus, it’s possible that it will end socially before it ends medically – we are already seeing signs of that in the US in states like Arizona, Texas, Florida and California where many young people are starting to socialise like before even though the virus is circulating in the community and infections continue to rise.
There is a hint of this happening elsewhere too – people are simply fed up of the coronavirus and the sacrifices involved in combating it. The price that we might have to pay for this lag between the social and medical end of the pandemic remains to be seen.
The views expressed by the author are personal.
                Courtesy Timesnownews