COVID-19 is on its way to becoming just another virus

This terrible scourge will always be with us,

but in a milder, less troubling form.

In the days before COVID-19, I’d often get frustrated by the response that doctors would give when I turned up at their clinics with some infection or other: “It’s just a virus,” they’d say

s someone who’s long been fascinated by the detective work that goes into tracing the origins and history of infections, the answer always seemed too perfunctory. Which virus was it? Where and when did this strain emerge? How many other people were getting infected with this same variant this year?

Those questions aren’t of much relevance to most general practitioners, because the majority of viruses simply burn themselves out as part of the teeming backdrop of endemic infections that roll around the globe each year. At some point, with rising immunity from vaccinations, infections and booster shots, COVID-19 will join that club.

Early last year, the world urgently needed to raise its sense of alarm around the SARS- CoV-2 virus, and see it as the imminent threat it was rather than a more routine infection on a par with influenza. Right now, though, the vaccinated parts of the planet need to mentally send themselves in the opposite direction. It’s time to remind ourselves that, for those who’ve been inoculated, COVID-19 is no longer a horseman of the apocalypse but instead is gradually becoming “just a virus.”

That’s broadly the place that some of the countries that have advanced furthest in their vaccination programs are reaching. Israel is riding out a surge in new cases without returning to lockdowns for the vaccinated, since the vast majority of infections no longer result in serious illness.

The calls from some quarters to stop publishing daily case totals may be premature for a disease that’s still killing thousands of people a day. At some point, though, when COVID-19 has passed from its current pandemic status to the endemic situation it will fade into the background.

It’s hard to believe but viruses through history have flipped between endemic and pandemic status with remarkable frequency.

The “Russian Flu” pandemic that circled the world in the late 1970s appears to have been an unremarkable seasonal flu strain from the 1940s and 1950s, possibly released to the world anew via a laboratory accident. Yellow fever, which shaped the history of the Americas for four centuries through its devastating effects on expeditionary military forces who lacked immunity, has now largely vanished from urban areas of the western hemisphere, while remaining a devastating infection in sub- Saharan Africa.

A July study in the journal Microbial Biotechnology even presented an argument that.a coronavirus strain calledA HCoV- OC43 might have been responsible for an 1889 outbreak also known as the Russian Flu, arguably the first true modern global pandemic. That particular strain now crops up as one of the main causes of the common cold.

We’re not at that stage yet. Fully vaccinated, I feel relatively sanguine about the likelihood that at some point in the years ahead I, too, will be exposed to COVID-19.

This terrible scourge will always be with us, but in a milder, less troubling form. After the trauma of the past two years, it’s hard to believe that we’ll ever look upon that prospect with a sense of equanimity — but that’s what must ultimately happen. The moment we’ve beaten COVID-19 won’t be when we eradicate it from the human population, but when we’ve reached a level of vaccinated and natural immunity where we no longer have reason to fear it. That moment will come — and when it does, even this dreadful infection will be just another virus.