When will Covid-19 end? Is Omicron the last strain? Here’s what experts say
The Omicron variant of coronavirus wreaked havoc across the world. The heavily mutated strain, after being discovered in November, rapidly spread across the globe, increasing hospitalisations and pushing the already stretched healthcare systems to limits in various countries.
Many experts said that existing vaccines were not proving to be effective against the strain, which was first detected in South Africa. Studies done in various laboratories indicated that inactivated virus vaccines, which make up a major portion of the 10 billion doses administered globally, elicit few antibodies against Omicron.
When the situation started worsening, people started asking when will the pandemic end? According to the researchers, Omicron is certainly not the last variant of coronavirus to appear.
Scientists say that Covid-19 will eventually become an endemic disease, and that the world will have to learn to live with it.
“I think it’s the expectation that the general behaviour is somehow towards the situation where we have so much immunity in the population that we would no longer see very deadly epidemics,” Sebastian Funk, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told scientific journal Nature.
However, top virologist Aris Katzourakis warned against treating the coronavirus disease as harmless “just because it will become endemic”. In an article published in Nature a few days ago, Katzourakis said that endemic has become one of the most misused of the pandemic.
He then explained what endemic means in epidemiological terms. Katzourakis said that a disease reaches an endemic stage when the number of people it is infecting balances out the basic reproduction number – those individuals who an infected person would pass on the infection too.
Mark Woolhouse, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, believes that Covid-19 will become endemic only when most adults are protected against severe infection because they have been exposed to the virus as children, and have developed immunity.
That will take decades, according to Woolhouse, and many adults who were not exposed to the virus as children will remain vulnerable.