Will Covid turn into the common cold?

Many experts and modellers thought that the 19 July reopening would be a disaster. So far, that has not been the case. Daily case numbers actually started falling within days after 19 July, although that was far too soon to have been caused by anything to do with ‘freedom day’. The question now is how the pandemic will play out for the rest of this year and the next? In trying to understand this, we need to understand some important things about the biology of coronaviruses and their interaction with their hosts: us.

Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, is not going away. Like other coronaviruses, it will likely infect us all repeatedly throughout the rest of our lives, probably about once every five years. Vaccines will blunt its path, but will protect less against infection over time (while still protecting against hospitalisation and death). Herd immunity will never happen but we will get to a manageable balance between immunity and infections.