pandemic to
ENDemic By Zubin Damania, MD Guest Columnist
Eyes on the future
S
o, people have been freaking out because the COVID-19 vaccines don’t seem to prevent reinfections, sometimes. And they’re thinking the pandemic’s just going to go on forever, especially when we’re back with masks and some countries have lockdowns. Let’s do some science on this, because it turns out it’s very likely, which is something we’ve been saying from the beginning, that this pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 is ultimately going to turn into an endemic, meaning a virus that lives with us seasonally and is no different than the common cold in the severity of disease it causes. When you look at the endemic cold viruses, everybody’s been infected at some point. Elders are protected from severe disease through multiple reinfections every cold season or so. The only new primary infections are in young kids and babies who innately blow it off, partially because they may have a lower concentration of ACE receptors, or - in the case of infants - antibodies from their mother. The seasonal cold “auto-vaccinates” us, that’s why
we don’t have a vaccine against the common cold, honestly. There are four endemic human coronaviruses that cause common cold-type symptoms around the world in a seasonal fashion. These have been with us for hundreds or thousands of years. Then we have three kinds of newschool coronaviruses: SARS-CoV-1, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2 (which causes COVID-19). MERS and SARSCoV-1 never achieved pandemic status because they were infectious only when you were having symptoms, so they were easier to contain; you could just identify, test, and isolate symptomatic people. SARS-CoV-2 is different, because asymptomatic people could infect others, and that’s why control and containment became pretty much impossible after it got out of the bag. When we consider antibody studies in the human population against those original four coronaviruses, we find there are two types of antibodies produced; one is IgM, which mounts an immediate response immediately after you're first infected, and the other is continued on next page...
HEALTH MAGAZINE | WINTER 2022
