When will the coronavirus epidemic end?



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“The fight against Covid-19 is not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Xavier Bettel expressed on social networks on Friday. One way to prepare Luxembourg for a pandemic with an uncertain outcome. One year after the first cases in China and more than eight months after the arrival of the epidemic in the Grand Duchy, it is difficult to imagine the outcome of this unprecedented health crisis in recent history. The main pandemics that decimated part of the population each had a variable duration: about 5 years for the Black Death in the Middle Ages, just over a year for the Spanish flu at the beginning of the 20th century. In this context, a question haunts most minds: when and how will the coronavirus epidemic end?

This is the most likely hypothesis to stop the epidemic, but also the one on which man has the greatest grip. A vaccine would allow a large part of the population to be immunized fairly quickly and thus stop the devastation of Covid-19. In history, only the measles epidemic has been stopped by a vaccine. But there are many uncertainties.

For this to work, the treatment in question must be effective, especially on the most vulnerable people, such as the elderly. However, this is not guaranteed. We also need to convince the population to be massively vaccinated, which is also a challenge in itself. When will it be available? Luxembourg and the European Union are hoping for the first doses to arrive at the end of the year, or early 2021. Last week Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their vaccine was “90% effective” against Covid- 19. This Monday, Moderna revealed that its candidate was working 94.5% …

Scientists are reassuring on the question: when a virus mutates, its transformation is generally favorable to humans. A virus that would become less aggressive and less lethal, this is what many experts are hoping for with Covid-19. A moment mentioned regarding this second wave, the possible weakening of the coronavirus is unfortunately unlikely compared to the first months of the epidemic.

“Nobody has the absolute truth, but I personally believe it hasn’t changed. Patients are no less affected, ”he explained The essential a general practitioner in Luxembourg. However, the prospect of the coronavirus turning into a mild cold is a possibility.

Few of the diseases are eradicated from the surface of the Earth. The most revealing example is that of the plague. The disease has caused millions of deaths in the past before disappearing in most countries. However, it regularly happens that in some regions of the world cases of plague break out, which leads to drastic sanitation measures in the affected places, in order to prevent the spread of the epidemic.

Outbreaks have recently been identified in China and Mongolia. More comparable to the coronavirus, not even MERS-CoV has disappeared but is limited to a few sporadic cases. As for Ebola, the disease regularly reappears in Africa, but the number of contaminations remains under control.

Often mentioned at the beginning of the outbreak, this possibility doesn’t attract many followers at the moment. The reasons are different: despite the hundreds of millions of coronavirus cases around the planet, the WHO estimates that the maximum 10% of the world population has contracted the virus. A figure very far from the 70% needed to obtain group immunity.

Also note that if so many people contract Covid-19, the death toll will automatically skyrocket in every country. Finally, there is no guarantee that a first infection will protect against recontamination. On the contrary, the first cases of reinfection have been reported around the world …

The most optimistic result is also the least realistic. Many were hoping for a SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) scenario. The epidemic that broke out in China in 2002/2003 frightened parts of the world before disappearing a few months later, killing 774 for 8,000 patients in total. The coronavirus has long surpassed these figures and nothing suggests a sudden disappearance of the virus in the months to come.

The second wave that is currently sweeping Europe shows, on the contrary, that Covid-19 seems to come back into force as soon as temperatures drop and the population gathers in confined places. Only China, it seems, has managed to contain the return of the epidemic. At the cost of drastic measures and an isolation difficult to imagine in European democracies …

(Thomas Holzer / The essential)

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