Other deadly viruses like MERS and HIV are still around, but we have learned to live with them.
The coronavirus pandemic has been going on for about five months now, worldwide. The race for the vaccine is on, and while some people feel it is OK now to mix and mingle more than we were doing before, others are still waiting things out.
While the vast majority of people who contract COVID-19 go on to recover fully, as we now know, some cannot fight the virus off once it settles into their system. For those living with underlying conditions that can result in a compromised immune system, this essentially means the world is not really a completely safe place to venture out into until a solid vaccine is made widely available. Even then, though, the world may be safer once again, but it may always be different than it was before 2020.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 could very well be with us forever. Yes, that sounds daunting. What might this mean, exactly, however?
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Dr. Mike Ryan, the emergencies director for the WHO spoke at a briefing in the first half of May, BBC.com states, and there, he pointed out that even after a vaccine is discovered, controlling the coronavirus will require “massive effort”. The virus we are dealing with spreads quickly, and has already infected millions of people worldwide. It has also killed hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of months.
Ryan went so far as to compare the coronavirus to HIV. Not that the two are similar in the way they affect people, but both viruses are potentially deadly, and HIV has still not been eradicated from the planet, since it first showed up in humans in the 1950s.
His point is that we, as a planet, have come to live with HIV in our midst. Medicine has come a long way in treating it. Patients living with HIV can now exist for a long time, whereas back in the 1980s and prior, it was a known death sentence because there was no medicine available to help treat it.
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Want further examples? The MERS virus caused an outbreak that has died down but that has not really ended. A vaccine for this virus is also in the works, but is not yet available, and so we are “living” with MERS indefinitely right now, whether we like it or not.
The new coronavirus could be here to stay, and we will simply have to learn to live with it. This is something that a vaccine will certainly help us do.
What should we be doing in the meantime?
As Dr. Ryan stated, “There is some magical thinking going on that lockdowns work perfectly and that unlocking lockdowns will go great. Both are fraught with dangers.”
This is true. Wash your hands. It is the best you can do.
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