Researchers worldwide are concerned with the question of how the corona pandemic will develop.
American scientists come to an optimistic forecast.
According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 2,032,787 people have died of or with the virus infection since the beginning of the corona pandemic (as of January 18, 2021).
According to French scientists, Covid-19 is three times as deadly as conventional flu *.
US researchers have now found a scenario in the model that is positive.
For example, Covid-19 could become a harmless form of endemic in the foreseeable future
- which, among other things, could be characterized by the fact that people fall ill in childhood and then carry antibodies for a lifetime that prevent severe disease progression in adulthood.
Again and again, comparisons are made between the flu and Covid-19.
The fact is: Both cases are viral infections.
Influenza is triggered by influenza viruses, Covid-19 by the pathogen Sars-CoV-2.
There are also parallels with regard to the risk groups: older, immunodeficient people are more at risk of developing a severe course of the disease.
However, the way in which influenza and corona viruses attack the body is fundamentally different
.
Covid-19, for example, can result in life-threatening brain and lung damage.
Scientists at Emory University in Atlanta and Pennsylvania State University have investigated how the corona pandemic could develop.
Among other things, they based their research on data collected so far on harmless coronaviruses (human coronaviruses, also HCoVs) that have been circulating for years.
And there are some of them: “
The coronavirus family includes a whole range of very different pathogens.
(...) About a third of typical "colds" are due to these largest of the RNA viruses and they also cause one or the other "diarrhea" ", informs the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research.
In the case of human coronaviruses, it had been shown: After an infection with such cold coronaviruses, a long-term immunity usually develops that extends into adulthood, according to the US researchers.
Corona pandemic in the future "may not be more contagious than a cold"
“Our model, which includes these components of immunity, encompasses both the current severity of Sars-CoV-2 and the benignity of HCoVs and suggests that Sars-CoV-2,
once the endemic phase is reached, and the first infection is in childhood, may not be more contagious than a cold,
”write the study authors.
Doctors speak of an endemic when a disease occurs more frequently in a region, i.e. the immune system usually has contact with the pathogen at an early age.
Corona vaccination for everyone - after that only for risk groups?
Study author Dr.
Jennie Lavine and her team assume that the death rate from Corona could be below that of the seasonal flu in the long term, i.e. below 0.1 percent - provided that Sars-CoV-2 behaves like human corona viruses in the future.
Their harmlessness could be due to the fact that people already have contact with them in childhood, according to the researchers.
Lavine's colleague Ottar Bjornstad of Penn State University believes, according to the MDR, that the high mortality rate and the need for corona vaccination will soon be history
: "Maximum efforts should be made to survive this virgin pandemic on the way to endemic", Bjornstad is quoted by the MDR.
However, it could still be a long time before the pandemic has reached the endemic stage.
The US model calculation shows that mass vaccination is therefore very important, especially in the first two years after vaccines have been made available.
After this period it could be possible that - as with the flu - only vulnerable risk groups such as old and immunocompromised people would have to be vaccinated.
However, the researchers point out that other scenarios are also possible.
For example, that coronavirus infections could become more threatening for children in the future.
In this case, mass vaccinations in infancy would be inevitable.
(jg)
*
Merkur.de is part of the nationwide Ippen-Digital editorial network
.
More sources: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
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