NEW YORK (AP) — Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the world has seen a dramatic improvement in infections, hospitalizations and death rates in recent weeks, signaling the crisis appears to be winding down. But how will it end? Past epidemics may provide clues.
The ends of epidemics are not as thoroughly researched as their beginnings. But there are recurring themes that could offer lessons for the months ahead, said Erica Charters of the University of Oxford, who studies the issue.
“One thing we have learned is it’s a long, drawn-out process” that includes different types of endings that may not all occur at the same time, she said. That includes a “medical end,” when disease recedes, the “political end,” when government prevention measures cease, and the “social end,” when people move on.
The COVID-19 global pandemic has waxed and waned differently in different parts of the world. But in the United States, at least, there is reason to believe the end is near.
About 65% of Americans are fully vaccinated, and about 29% are both vaccinated and boosted. Cases have been falling for nearly two months, with the U.S. daily average dropping about 40% in the last week alone. Hospitalizations also have plummeted, down nearly 30%. Mask mandates are vanishing — even federal health officials have stopped wearing them — and President Joe Biden has said it’s time for people to return to offices and many aspects of pre-pandemic life.
But this pandemic has been full of surprises, lasting more than two years and causing nearly 1 million deaths in the U.S. and more than 6 million around the world. Its severity has been surprising, in part because many people drew the wrong lesson from a 2009-2010 flu pandemic that turned out to be nowhere as deadly as initially feared.
“We got all worried but then nothing happened (in 2009), and I think that was what the expectation was” when COVID-19 first emerged, said Kristin Heitman, a Maryland-based researcher who collaborated with Charters.
That said, some experts offered takeaways from past epidemics that may inform how the end of the COVID-19 pandemic may play out.
FLU
Before COVID-19, influenza was considered the most deadly pandemic agent. A 1918-1919 flu pandemic killed 50 million people around the world, including 675,000 in the U.S., historians estimate. Another flu pandemic in 1957-1958 killed an estimated 116,000 Americans, and another in 1968 killed 100,000 more.
A new flu in 2009 caused another pandemic, but one that turned out not to be particularly dangerous to the elderly — the group that tends to die the most from flu and its complications. Ultimately, fewer than 13,000 U.S. deaths were attributed to that pandemic.
The World Health Organization in August 2010 declared the flu had moved into a post-pandemic period, with cases and outbreaks moving into customary seasonal patterns.
In each case, the pandemics waned as time passed and the general population built immunity. They became the seasonal flu of subsequent years. That kind of pattern is probably what will happen with the coronavirus, too, experts say.
“It becomes normal,” said Matthew Ferrari, director of Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics. “There’s a regular, undulating pattern when there’s a time of year when there’s more cases, a time of year when there’s less cases. Something that’s going to look a lot like seasonal flu or the common cold.”
HIV
