Muhammad Sharif Altaf :
Covid-19 is one of the largest and most immediate threats to human life that took the world by storm in early this year. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared it a pandemic, meaning that it’s spreading worldwide. The death toll is rising and everyone is asking the same question: when will the pandemic end?
As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, most countries of the world have taken measures to protect their people by imposing lockdown and mandatory mass quarantines. People have been asked to practice social distancing and stay at home. Public transport would be limited and advice was given to avoid them. But Covid-19 lockdown significantly affects people’s lives and livelihoods. Because of continuing this shutdown, the downgrade of global growth has made the Great Lockdown the worst recession since the Great Depression, and far worse than the Global Financial Crisis. It noticed negative effects on employment, income and expenditures of people, especially those from low-income groups. People are losing their jobs and students are suffering from an extremely bad impact on education because of the near-total closures of schools, universities and colleges. The pandemic has also negatively impacted mental health globally, including increased loneliness resulting from social distancing. So, it is high time we thought how to end the pandemic to return to our normal life.
Before we can talk about how the pandemic will end, we first have to understand what the “end” of a pandemic actually means. How do we know when it’s over, and who exactly is it over for? What specific criteria or milestones are we aiming for before we can declare a pandemic over? According to medical historians, pandemics actually have two types of ending – a medical ending and a social ending.
A medical ending happens where there are no people left to get sick. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone is dead – although that’s certainly one way a pandemic can end. An outbreak can be ended medically when the infection can no longer spread, either because a significant percentage of people are immune or have been vaccinated, or even because of strict social distancing measures making it impossible for the infection to find new victims. It will take a vaccine to stop transmission effectively. Compared with other viruses, coronaviruses don’t have as many ways to interact with host cells.
Within the next several months, one or possibly several vaccines will become widely and hopefully freely, available thanks to a worldwide effort. Once 40-90% of the population has received it- the precious amount varying based on the virus- hard immunity kicks in, and the pandemic fizzles out. But unless the virus is completely eradicated which is highly unlikely there will be risks of it escalating to pandemic levels once again. Factors like animals carrying and transmitting the virus might undermine our best efforts altogether. That’s why vaccination, assisted by as much global coordination as possible, is generally considered to be the best way. It’s the slow, steady and proven option. Even if the pandemic officially ends before a vaccine is ready, the virus may appear seasonally, so vaccines will continue to protect people.
We just talk the ways that a pandemic can medically end, but pandemics can also have a social ending. According to Dr. Jeremy Green, a historian of medicine at John Hopkins, “When people ask, ‘When will this end?’, they are asking about the social ending.” A social end to the pandemic doesn’t mean the disease is gone – it just means that people have learned to live with it. A pandemic can end socially when people stop fearing the disease, become sick of quarantine restrictions, and decide to go on with daily life by complying with social distancing regulations such as washing hands, wearing a cloth face covering over mouth and nose and staying at least 6 feet away from others etc. Pandemics don’t end medically or socially – most end socially before they end medically, and a true medical ending is actually nearly impossible. In most cases, we learn to live with the disease, and manage its spread to prevent widespread outbreaks, but it’s rare that a disease is truly medically eradicated.
The pandemic won’t medically end at least until we have a vaccine – and then it will take time to vaccinate the whole world and be able to say the pandemic is medically over. Even then, we’ll still need to be watching out for new strains of the virus. Socially, though, it looks like this pandemic could end quite soon, regardless of whether it’s medically safe or not. The people have to learn to control and manage the virus using the tools they have and to make the adjustments to their daily lives that are needed to keep themselves and each other safe.
Take heart, the pandemic will end. Its legacy can be long-lasting, but not all bad; the breakthroughs, social services, and systems we develop can be used to the betterment of everyone. And if we take inspiration from the successes and lessons from the failures, we can keep the next potential pandemic so contained that our children’s children won’t even know it’s name.
(Sharif Altaf is a student, Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka).
