Ending the COVID-19 pandemic will mean boosting everyone’s immune systems on Earth, but the virus spreads quickly and can take years to “take hold,” says an infectious disease specialist.
Just as some scientists have started to voice the idea that COVID-19 may have reached the peak of its evolution with the Delta variant and people have started to take steps to learn to live with the virus, a new variant has appeared. Omicron has been identified in several parts of the world.
The Dr Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, said that while vaccines are extremely important, strong political leadership and policies are what will help bring COVID-19 under control, a strategy reinforced by the emergence of the Omicron variant.
“I’m guessing right here, but what’s probably going to happen is this virus isn’t going to go away for a very, very, very long time,” he said in an interview.
Simon Fraser University virologist Professor Mark Brockman said COVID-19 is taking over human cells and asking them to make more viruses. Sometimes errors or typos occur in the duplication process, producing new variants.
“There have been so many people in the world who have been infected with the virus, that we have given it a lot of opportunities to mutate, and even create very, very rare mutations,” he explained.
Coronaviruses don’t mutate as quickly as other viruses, Brockman said, noting that hepatitis C and HIV change much faster.
But this slower rate of evolution is offset by global infections, giving the virus millions of chances to become more transmissible, he noted.
“It was a bit surprising at the population level that the variants appeared and spread so, so easily or so quickly,” Brockman said.
“We did not foresee that the virus would have spread so quickly, so widely to so many people,” he added.
While it is “important for people to know that we will not have to live with various public health measures forever,” Dr.r Bogoch said it was difficult to predict anything beyond about two months.
Scientists and researchers are studying other respiratory viral pandemics to estimate how long COVID-19 could stay.
“I guess the pandemic would last a total of two to four years and then we would start to see things take hold, depending on what country you live in. But it’s not the flu, ”said Dr Bogoch.
“So I mean there are lessons I think we can learn from other pandemics, but we also have to recognize that it’s not about the flu and it might behave a bit.” differently. ”
The World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement that the possibility of eradicating the virus is largely over.
“We are heading for a virus that is becoming endemic, which means it will stay with us,” the organization said.
“There is no formal definition or endpoint at which an epidemic is considered a pandemic or ceases to be one, so this is not a simple question to answer,” it says.
A pandemic is defined as the worldwide spread of a disease that is new or that affects many more people than normal, the WHO said.
“At this time, the WHO considers COVID-19 to continue to be a pandemic. If we are able to reduce and limit the spread of the disease and avoid the large number of deaths we are seeing today, we can move beyond the pandemic stage. ”
Christopher Rutty, professor of medical history at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, said smallpox has sparked debates about immunization, while polio, like COVID-19, has demonstrated the importance of political leadership.
The Spanish flu “kind of died out”, evolved into less severe strains and became more seasonal, he added.
“But COVID is new. This is uncharted territory, ”said Mr. Rutty.
“You can go back in time to different diseases, but there are a lot of differences in economics and politics at different times, the way people move. If some people are not fully vaccinated then there are still viruses circulating and people traveling and that is what makes it hard to see the end. ”
Professor Sarah Otto, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia, said the virus could evolve in combinations of mutations that “give it a fitness advantage”, helping it to develop. transmit faster or make it more dangerous, which Omicron would have done, it seems.
The unusual thing about this virus is that it is a ‘generalist’, allowing it to move easily between species, said Mme Otto.
The virus has now been able to spread to a number of animals, including pets, hippos, big cats, primates and minks. The Canadian government announced that the COVID-19 virus was found in white-tailed deer in Quebec in early December.
The presence in animals “means that we will not be able to eradicate SARS-CoV-2 because it is now in enough animals for it to circulate and come back to us,” she explained.
There are a number of unknowns with such infections, including which animals have the greatest risk of transmitting the disease to humans, said Mme Otto.
The other problem with COVID-19 is that it can go unnoticed with the infected person showing no symptoms for long periods of time, she said.
Vaccines are expected to have taught our immune system to recognize the spike protein produced by the virus, despite Omicron’s many changes, she said.
According to Mme Otto, the “interesting thing” about the human immune system is that it is not a one-off reaction, but that a number of cells and antibodies are made which recognize many different parts of viruses. and bacteria.
While the evolution of organisms never stops, strengthening the immune system with vaccination makes it difficult to infect the body with the COVID-19 virus, said Mme Otto.
“It’s like hundreds of little hammers, hitting hundreds of nails in hundreds of different places. ”