- The coronavirus pandemic as we now know
it will eventually end,
but not in the way you might think.
History offers important lessons.
- The only epidemic or infectious disease
that has ended biologically is smallpox.
And so there is very little precedent
in how something ends biologically.
- If you follow the late phases
of the smallpox eradication program,
which focused intense surveillance and policing.
- The question was asked over and over again,
"Have you seen anyone who looks like this?"
- There's a bit of a hubris that takes place
in the field of medicine,
this notion that all infectious diseases
could ultimately be conquered.
- Usually viruses don't go away.
The seasonal flu, for example,
is a descendant of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
- Well, of course, there was no vaccine for anyone in 1918.
The pandemic I think ended really
when a vast majority of the population
was exposed to the virus and the immune system
became capable of dealing with the virus.
- This is part of the basis of moving
towards calculations of herd immunity.
We're at a moment in which 60% to 80%
of the American population has been vaccinated
or has otherwise acquired immunity against COVID,
and the epidemic has not ended.
We are now experiencing some of the limitations
of a vaccine centric public health response.
- The kind of global inequalities
that are coded into the global health structure,
it takes years for a vaccine
to really be an efficient way of managing an epidemic.
- It's not surprising that we see new variants.
- Tonight, the Delta variant fueling
an alarming rise in cases across this country.
- The troubling new variant of the virus.
- But happens globally will impact us.
So if we get more people vaccinated globally
and more people vaccinated now,
hopefully within a reasonable period of time,
we will get to that point
where it might occasionally be up and down in background,
but it won't dominate us the way it's doing right now.
- Experts say COVID-19
will transition into an endemic disease,
existing permanently in a population like the measles,
chicken pox, or HIV.
- The analogy I would make here is that
as HIV moved from a death sentence
to a treatable chronic condition,
it became more like diabetes, another endemic disease
that we simply think of as part of everyday life
and can be managed with proper resources.
- Historians also say epidemics end
when they disappear from public consciousness.
But that doesn't mean the threat is gone.
- The history of prior pandemics teaches us that once a disease
is no longer considered to be a concern or a risk
for an affluent or mainstream or middle class
that it can disappear from view.
- That's one of the ways that epidemics end --
we don't think about them anymore.
- The Ebola pandemic,
once that pandemic was declared over --
-NGOs and international aid pulls out of regions
that are still very much struggling with the disease.
- As soon as there's a declaration
that this pandemic is over, we need to ask, "Over for whom?"
- COVID theoretically could turn into a disease
that's not a problem in places that have adequate
health infrastructure and access to healthcare,
but would still continue to be a problem in other places.
- The people with long COVID,
the people who have lost family members, friends, and so on,
who will continue to live with that loss.
So I think we need to be very careful
when we're thinking about that ending,
to make space for these various problems
and various ways that the epidemic lives on.