Coronavirus: don’t bank on epidemic easing in the summer, scientists say
- Seasonal viruses tend to die off as the weather warms, but not enough is known about the new strain to assume it will react in the same way, experts say
- Sars was brought under control in 2003 by an ‘extremely intense public health effort’, but it never disappeared, professor of epidemiology says
Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Centre for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the United States, said it was a “prevailing misconception” that Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) disappeared in the summer of 2003.
“I think the word ‘disappear’ is a terrible word for what happened with Sars,” he said. “Sars was controlled by extremely intense public health efforts, heroic and perhaps unprecedented in modern times. It did not disappear at all.”
As SARS-CoV-2 – the formal name for the new coronavirus – spreads around the world, the different ways in which countries deal with it will have a major impact on how long its stays around, experts said.
“We are not sure whether it (Covid-19) will recur, but with the differences in public health legislature, policies and patterns of human behaviour at the global level it will last for a while,” said Professor Emily Chan Ying-yang, a medical professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a visiting professor at Oxford University.
Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Centre for Health Security in the US, said it was likely the novel coronavirus would become endemic.