When and How Will COVID-19 End? / Episode 15 – The Medical Futurist

hi I'm dr.

battle Amish cool and now that the coronavirus has taken over our lives I want to answer the one question that's on everyone's mind when will this nightmare finally end the ongoing pandemic is exerting the whole vert both physically and mentally in the US alone half of the adults report high levels of anxiety due to recovery 19 the OVA things to go back to business as usual but the virus won't just miraculously go away as Strom said it's here to stay and we are only at the first inning in terms of fighting this thing before the vaccine is even possible we have many months of struggle ahead of us why we learn about this new virus and set up treatment protocols that's why we need to flatten the curve many people heard this term for the first time in recent weeks is the reason why we have to stay at home and isolate ourselves without this social distancing covered 19 would spread like a vise fire overloading healthcare systems causing mass numbers of excess death but why we flattened the curve we don't just spare our crumbling healthcare systems you're actually gaining time for ourselves since the vaccine is far off on the horizon maybe early next year first we need treatment protocols to save as many lives as possible and for that we need time to learn about the pathological background of the coronavirus positions the researchers are gathering data and information about this new virus and how it affects people let's happening every day on the front lines and there is a global collaboration behind it back in February Chinese scientists were the first a sequence and share the virus genome and now we are at the patient level learning about how infected patients respond to treatments in the next few months we will have that data from millions of patients and we will be able to treat people more efficiently if you can come up with drugs and treatments to stop the illness to become severe in patients we can proceed to free up the burden hospitals and medical professionals and start to get back to our lives by we learn to live with the virus clinical trials are already underway for many potential treatments like Gilead from the severe or Japanese drugs that proved to be successful against the seasonal flu but there are factors where we are simply still in the dark we know people develop antibodies against the virus but why the antibodies are at least partially protective a recent South Korean study showed that more than a hundred people call the disease for the second time after they recovered and we don't yet know why we need to monitor this closely as the effectiveness of the antibodies won't just affect treatment plans but national strategies like Sweden's but the current plan is to let the virus go through the population to develop herd immunity the way it works with the regular flu if we learn that we don't build up immunity against cough in nineteen the same way then Sweden is actively jeopardizing citizens by the UK and the US had been flirting with an absolute disaster in the pandemics first weeks there are other important questions – how long do the antibodies protect us do the spread of the virus be affected by warm weather for how long do we have to practice social distancing then and how can we go back to schools work and our lives in general then we will watch FC Barcelona play again and when can be hug our loved ones without fear of course we have been doing and looking at forecasts about the possible scenarios so let's look at the three most popular ones scenario one first we could follow the Chinese path after the outbreak overwhelmed one and it became clear how serious the situation is the Chinese quickly implemented a series of strict lock downs and restricted people's movements by March the rate of new infections started to fall and if we can believe the Chinese numbers China is now a case study on how to bring this virus under control if you remain focused self isolate and keep strict lock downs we can slow down this virus enough that are struggling calculus terms we'll be able to pull through this way we will be able to implement successful treatment plans to limit mortality it means we could go back to life in the coming weeks or so scenario 2 a slightly less optimistic version is that only a handful of countries will follow China's path while others will be overwhelmed by the virus in those other countries there will still be months of high numbers of new infections every day and lot of people who die we will be under lockdown during the summer and life might go back to partially normal by the fall it flights operating again from the summer months and us but the elderly for sure practicing social distancing from the rest of the year or at least until the vaccine arrives and we start vaccinating people globally you can imagine it will take some time this scenario is probably the most likely meaning that the majority of this year will be dominated by our fight against this pandemic scenario 3 the least likely scenario is really bad in this version most countries would fold under the pressure the virus would not just survive the summer but could start a second wave during the cold months and perhaps even the herd immunity is out of the window that would mean hundreds of millions of people getting infected and with collapsing healthcare systems the mortality to skyrocket to eight ten percent or even higher which would mean tens of millions dead in this scenario it will probably suffer the consequences until a vaccine could stop it spread a new science paper just plated that the US for example might have to keep social distancing well into 2022 so how are we standing today one of the most positive examples we've had so far is the case of Germany they have one of the highest numbers of coffee'd 19 cases yet the number of fatal cases is just merely a fraction of it the German mortality rate has been consistently lower than that of those nations sharing a similarly high number of confirmed cases like China Italy or Spain even experts are a bit puzzled about their success rate but we are learning that there are several factors at play that other countries can and should adopt early testing transparent communication from their leaders avail prepared health IT infrastructure and good digital health policies differentiate that Germany's approach from that of others with a high death toll another country like that is South Korea despite us then spike in infections South Korea is getting closer to beating Kobe 19 there's a thought she was simple by April they already tested 400, 000 people one of the biggest advantages of this virus is that it moves fast and it's highly infectious but South Korea managed to be faster the ability to do that all stems from their previous experience with the 2015 MERS outbreak that led to 185 confirmed cases so when Kobe 19 hit South Korea they moved fast set up drive-throughs testing stations and were extremely transparent with the public about crisis management but even contests that are the most affected like Italy and Spain you see the curve go down according to predictions a lot more people have been infected than the numbers we see in the reports if we do build up immunity against copy 19 when you go over 50% or so the epidemic will come down naturally simply because the virus has fewer people – in fact that's what happened in all the previous epidemics – so when will all this finally end the simple answer is that the real end of this pandemic will be the implementation of the successful vaccine but it's not going to be an easy road traditionally it takes years to develop test and manufacture a vaccine the one that worked in Congo against Ebola was under development for a decade but one factors is giving science a head start against cope in nineteen is that the whole genome of the virus was sequenced and shared rapidly 70 different types of vaccines are currently being researched with clinical trials on patients coming shortly after a summer but scientists warn us that the soonest possible date for a vaccine could be early 2021 obviously we can't wait that long it's going to be a challenging year for a global economy and for all of us in the meantime we will slowly learn to fight this thing and to live with it until the day comes when you can finally defeat it have no doubts we will defeat it with the power of science medicine and biotech there will be a vaccine and effective treatments however even if you can lift restrictions soon the life big go back to will not be the same we used to have so for me the big question is what the world will look like after the crisis ends how will healthcare work and most importantly everyday life will change and I will explore that in the next video if you like this video and you want to hear more about how technologies can help fight copied 19 please subscribe here [Music].