In the episode of This Week in Virology TWiV 1151: Hotel California for Phage, there is an interesting discussion of when SARS-COV2 might become a more routine common cold-like virus.
That discussion begins at one hour and 21 minutes into the episode (1:21:18), but I took the auto-generated sub-titles that YouTube creates, and cleaned them up a bit and added them here. It begins when they read a letter from a listener:
John writes, “At the end of episode 1153 there were some statements that Dr Barrack had correctly predicted that SARS-COV2 would become an endemic virus taking its place alongside the other common cold Corona viruses. I’ve been thinking about this topic for quite a while now as I remember Dr Barrack’s statement in episode 591. I’m not sure SARS-COV2 has reached that point yet. I think in general no one worries about getting a cold. You feel bad for a couple of days, crummy for a few more, then back to normal. Each time you get a cold you expect the same outcome you don’t need annual or a semiannual vaccines antivirals or worry about ending up in the hospital or worse. As Dr Griffin shares with us on his weekly updates, people are still dying from Covid because they were not offered Paxlovid.
“You may get Covid multiple times and your symptoms with the next infection may not be predicted by your prior infections. I have had Covid three times so far, and the symptoms each time were different. To me it does not seem that SARS-COV2 is ready to be considered a common cold yet. Am I missing something?”
No, no, you’re right, John it’s not yet. Dr Barrack said probably it’s going to take 50 years in that episode 591 for this to happen. Because essentially you have to have a situation where everyone’s first encounter with SARS-COV2 is at a young age, less than 60 let’s say, and currently it’s not the case. We have to get rid of all, well, we have to get rid of, we have to get rid of all the old people.
You know what I’m talking about, including me.
I’m one of them.
Um when there is a whole generation with your first encounter is young then it’ll become a common cold virus. It could take 50 years to do that.
Yeah, in the meantime, um, the what, I, what I’ve heard several people say is, um, the threshold for public perception of it and for treating it as a more routine event is really for fatalities to get down to the level that we see with flu, which we’re getting to and that’ll happen a lot sooner than 50 years.
Um, now flu is a very serious virus that kills on average like 30,000 Americans a year, uh, but people shrug at that. They say, yeah, it’s not going to happen to me.
Um, so covid-19 is reaching a point now or for a lot of people has reached a point where they say, yeah, you know it still kills a number of people but it’s not going to happen to me and we’re not parking refrigerated trucks in the streets of New York to hold all the bodies and you know setting up improvised medical tents and all this sort of stuff so as the case fatality rate has dropped and really plummeted since Omron.
Um, the, the public perception of it has become that this is a much more routine endemic thing, but yes, to get to real common cold levels like the other Corona viruses it’s going to take a generation.