When Will the Pandemic Be Over?
Finally, it seems we have turned a corner with the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. More than 117 million individuals have been fully vaccinated. That’s about 35.4% of the population, with another 11% that have received at least one of the doses of mRNA vaccines. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authorized the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children ages 12 to 15, meaning even more people will be eligible for vaccination and can help to further slow the spread of new cases. New infections, new hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19 have all been trending downward nationally over the past two weeks. Even epidemiologists are starting to feel some cautious optimism.
Globally, though, the world is still in a rough place. Cases and deaths have surged at various points in Brazil and India. Variants are still circulating, and we’re detecting new ones all the time. Global vaccination rates remain low, and access to vaccination in low- and middle-income countries is terrible. The Biden administration has called for a waiver of intellectual property rights so that developing countries can produce their own vaccines. It has also pledged to share doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine (not yet authorized in the United States), but donated doses don’t go very far, and starting production in other countries will take time to ramp up. In the meantime, the pandemic continues.
But 16 months into this, we can start looking to a future where the acute emergency of the outbreak has subsided. While most epidemics have a defined starting point, such as the first individual known to be infected or, in the case of SARS-CoV-2, the first report of an excess of cases of pneumonia with unknown cause in China, the end of a pandemic is generally fuzzier and more ill-defined. How will we know when this global disease outbreak is “over”? And what comes next?
Potential pandemic outcomes
René F. Najera, Dr.PH., epidemiologist and editor of the History of Vaccines Project from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, explains that a large, immune population is what has typically ended other historical pandemics. “Either a substantial number of people got the disease and became immune, a substantial number died, or a successful vaccine was developed and successfully deployed,” Dr. Najera tells SELF. The 1918 influenza pandemic subsided because of the first scenario, but only after infecting approximately a third of the world’s population and killing at least 50 million people. Vaccines have worked to end the scourge of smallpox, while polio vaccines have reduced cases to fewer than 100 a year.
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https://www.self.com/story/when-will-pandemic-be-over
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