COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, wasn’t the first pandemic and it won’t be the last.
By the time the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020, it had spread across 114 countries and killed over 4,000 people. Now, it has spread throughout 222 countries and caused more than 5 million deaths.
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So when will it end? The short answer is: we don’t exactly know.
But both health experts and pandemics from the past offer insight into the medical and social cues marking the end of global disease outbreaks, such as the coronavirus disease, the latest pandemic declared by WHO.
WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus maintains that we need to vaccinate people around the world, especially those considered most at-risk.
“WHO’s global targets remain to support every country to vaccinate at least 10% of its population by the end of (September 2021), at least 40% by the end of this year and 70% of the world’s population by the middle of next year,” he said during a media briefing in September.
Various medical researchers specializing in epidemiology suggest that pandemics don’t disappear, but rather transmute into endemics, which contain the disease within a smaller subset of people and places, as immunologist Yonatan Grad explained to the Harvard Gazette.
Grad predicts that COVID-19 will see a similar fate, slowly faltering under the efficacy of an immunity brought on by vaccination and natural infection.
Historically, respiratory viruses weaken and die out with the advent of rising immunity rates, according to a report from The Washington Post.
And while most disease experts agree that COVID-19 will continue mutating, they said it will become more like influenza over time—a deadly pandemic reduced to a seasonal flu.
A National Geographic feature shows most preceding pandemic causes still linger, in stray genetic strands, less lethal variants and seasonal flu strains.
Remnants of the 1918 flu pandemic still crop up in contemporary flu strains. Bacteria borne of the bubonic and pneumonic plagues just recently caused over 3,200 cases and 584 deaths worldwide. But their deadliness has been downgraded.
The only disease successfully squashed is smallpox, the last known case surfacing in the U.K. in 1978.
The eradication was largely due to two centuries of vaccinations, a method scientists credit to helping battle and end today’s coronavirus.
But pandemics also end with the people, and historians said the social side of it all could end before it does medically. As we grow tired of the pandemic, we achieve a sense of finality that hasn’t been earned scientifically.
That means experiencing the relaxing of COVID-19 protocols, such as mask mandates and social distancing, something we’ve already seen happening across certain areas of Central Florida, including schools and theme parks, before eradication is medically achieved.
WHO’s director-general said it best at a news briefing in 2021: “The pandemic will end when the world chooses to end it. It’s in our hands.”