‘Virus will be with us for four or five years’

IT could be four to five years before the Covid-19 pandemic is under control, a senior global health official has said.

Soumya Swaminathan, the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) chief scientist, told the FT’s Global Boardroom digital conference: “I would say in a four to five-year timeframe, we could be looking at controlling this.”

Influential factors include whether the virus matures, the containment measures put in place and the development of a vaccine, she told the conference.

She said that a vaccine “seems for now the best way out”, but there were “lots of ifs and buts” about its efficacy and safety, as well as its production and equitable distribution, the newspaper reported.

Asked about the comments during the WHO’s tri-weekly briefing from Geneva, Dr Mike Ryan, who heads up the organisation’s health emergencies programme, said no one could predict when the disease would disappear.

But he also issued a warning about easing lockdown measures without appropriate surveillance measures in place adding: “We should not be waiting to see if opening of lockdowns have worked counting the bodies in the morgue.”

He said: “We have a new virus entering the human population for the first time, and therefore it is very hard to predict when we will prevail over it.

“What is clear, and I think maybe what Soumya may have been alluding to, is that the current number of people in our population who’ve been infected is actually relatively low.

“And if you’re a scientist, and you project forward in the absence of a vaccine, and you try and calculate ‘how long is it going to take for enough people to be infected so that this disease settles into an endemic trace’?

“And it is important to put this on the table - this virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities. And this virus may never go away.

“HIV has not gone away, we’ve come to terms with the virus and we have found the therapies and we found the prevention methods, and people don’t feel as scared as they did before and we’re offering long healthy life to people with HIV.”

He continued: “I don’t think anyone can predict when or if this disease will disappear.

“We do have one great hope - if we do find a highly effective vaccine that we can distribute to everyone who needs it in the world, we may have a shot at eliminating this virus.

“But that vaccine will have to be highly effective.”