How Pandemics End

[Peter1469]

How Pandemics End

History teaches us that pandemics end in one of two ways. First, a medical end- the incidence of death rates plummet, and second a social end, when people get fed up with restrictions and learn to live with the disease.

According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes.

“When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins.

In other words, an end can occur not because a disease has been vanquished but because people grow tired of panic mode and learn to live with a disease. Allan Brandt, a Harvard historian, said something similar was happening with Covid-19: “As we have seen in the debate about opening the economy, many questions about the so-called end are determined not by medical and public health data but by sociopolitical processes.”

How will Covid-19 end?

Will that happen with Covid-19?


One possibility, historians say, is that the coronavirus pandemic could end socially before it ends medically. People may grow so tired of the restrictions that they declare the pandemic over, even as the virus continues to smolder in the population and before a vaccine or effective treatment is found.


“I think there is this sort of social psychological issue of exhaustion and frustration,” the Yale historian Naomi Rogers said. “We may be in a moment when people are just saying: ‘That’s enough. I deserve to be able to return to my regular life.’”


It is happening already; in some states, governors have lifted restrictions, allowing hair salons, nail salons and gyms to reopen, in defiance of warnings by public health officials that such steps are premature. As the economic catastrophe wreaked by the lockdowns grows, more and more people may be ready to say “enough.”


“There is this sort of conflict now,” Dr. Rogers said. Public health officials have a medical end in sight, but some members of the public see a social end.


“Who gets to claim the end?” Dr. Rogers said. “If you push back against the notion of its ending, what are you pushing back against? What are you claiming when you say, ‘No, it is not ending.’”


The challenge, Dr. Brandt said, is that there will be no sudden victory. Trying to define the end of the epidemic “will be a long and difficult process.”

[FindersKeepers]

How Pandemics End

History teaches us that pandemics end in one of two ways. First, a medical end- the incidence of death rates plummet, and second a social end, when people get fed up with restrictions and learn to live with the disease.

Both appear to be happening here, much to democrats' chagrin.

[usaf81]

Well over 700,000 Americans have died from AIDS , a disease we still havn't found a vaccine yet for. Still 13,000 die a year from it despite effective treatments for what is now a chronic disease.

We'll never have a world free of COVID due to its incubation time, ease of transmission, and the fact its spread all over the world. That window closed when the Chinese decided to screw planet Earth in the first weeks. Already the protein they are targeting for vaccines has mutated. My best uneducated guess is it will end up being like Influenza and at best we'll get a new vaccine for it every year that will be partially effective and will hopefully develop treatments for infections.

[Peter1469]

That sounds likely.

Well over 700,000 Americans have died from AIDS , a disease we still havn't found a vaccine yet for. Still 13,000 die a year from it despite effective treatments for what is now a chronic disease.

We'll never have a world free of COVID due to its incubation time, ease of transmission, and the fact its spread all over the world. That window closed when the Chinese decided to screw planet Earth in the first weeks. Already the protein they are targeting for vaccines has mutated. My best uneducated guess is it will end up being like Influenza and at best we'll get a new vaccine for it every year that will be partially effective and will hopefully develop treatments for infections.