Virus could come back each year, study warns

COVID-19 could resemble a pandemic flu that comes back every year, scientists found in a Harvard study published Tuesday that concluded a single lockdown will not be enough to halt the novel coronavirus.

Instead, we may have to go through multiple rounds of social distancing, well into 2022, in order to ensure there is minimal strain on hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

The authors of the study, published in Science, conducted a computer simulation of the virus, basing the model on estimates of other coronaviruses’ seasonality and immunity in the U.S.

“We found that one-time social-distancing measures are likely to be insufficient to maintain the incidence of (COVID-19) within the limits of critical-care capacity in the United States,” lead author Stephen Kissler said in a call with reporters.

Without a vaccine or any other treatments, life cannot simply return to normal after the first lockdown. Multiple efforts at social distancing will have to be put in place otherwise, Kissler said, because current health-care capacity would not be able to support the surge of infections.

Giving the examples of South Korea and Singapore, researchers wrote that effective distancing could reduce the strain on healthcare systems and enable contact tracing and quarantine to be feasible.

Currently, there are no vaccines for the novel coronavirus and, so, periodic lockdowns would allow hospitals to ramp up their critical-care capacity for when infections surge.

As vaccines become available, the length and severity of lockdowns can ease.

When cases begin to spike, herd immunity could also occur, said co-author Marc Lipsitch. Herd immunity refers to a situation in which enough people in a population have immunity to an infection to effectively stop the disease from spreading. On the other hand, the authors warn, if social distancing is pushed too far, where there are too many lockdowns, it could spell disaster.

With one of the models, “the social distancing was so effective that virtually no population immunity is built,” the paper said, hence the need for a middle ground.

The study acknowledged that prolonged distancing would most likely have profoundly negative economic, social, and educational consequences.

The researchers noted a major drawback with their simulations is how little is known about COVID-19, especially the immunity of a previously infected person and how long that immunity lasts. However, the authors said it was highly unlikely the population would build an immunity strong enough to eliminate the virus and that a resurgence could happen as late as 2024.

Nearly 2-million people globally have been infected with COVID-19, and more than 124,000 have died.