David Heymann, a professor who chairs the strategic and technical advisory group for infectious hazards for the World Health Organisation, has expressed his fears that COVID-19 could become endemic. This means that it will become a permanent feature in our infectious disease landscape in the same way that the flu is, with the capability to cause serious outbreaks intermittently.
He said: “It may be that the coronavirus can’t be eliminated from the body.”
Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, has so far been strategising the country’s defence against the coronavirus based on the belief that once someone has the virus and has beaten it, they will have developed antibodies for life that will prevent them from becoming infected again.
However, recent reports show that some people in South Korea have tested for the coronavirus more than once. Despite having a low death rate from COVID-19 in this country, they have so far on recorded 217 deaths, South Korean officials announced on April 6 that they had 51 cases in which patients had tested positive for the virus for the second time.
This number rose to 74 cases last week and now stands at 116.
On this worrying discovery, Heymann said: “South Korea is trying to find out if these tests show reinfection or recrudescence – that is, recurrence of the same infection. But that data won’t be available for a few weeks. The feeling is that there are antibodies produced, and they may be protective, but to say that you are protected enough to go out and expose yourself to the infection again might not be wise because you don’t know the level of protection you’re getting from these antibodies.”
“The chances are that COVID-19 may linger longer than we hope, and it may linger indefinitely.”
Other experts have also expressed the same belief with Jan Albert, a professor of infectious disease control at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden telling the BBC, “We would expect to see COVID-19 becoming endemic. And it would be surprising if it didn’t show seasonality. This big question is whether the sensitivity of this virus to [the seasons] will influence its capacity to spread in a pandemic situation.”
However, Dr. Stephen Gluckman, an infectious diseases physician, believes that once most people have been infected with COVID-19 and recovered, they will likely be immune. This is based on what he has seen from the other strains of coronavirus.
He said: “For the most part, the feeling is once you’ve had a specific coronavirus, you are immune. We don’t have enough data to say that with this coronavirus, but it is likely.”
This would mean that people who initially recover from the coronavirus are more likely to relapse than become reinjected.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tested negative for COVID-19 on leaving hospital and is now recovering at his country residence, Chequers in Buckinghamshire, with his fiancée Carrie Symonds.
His official spokesman has said that he is not “currently carrying out any government work” and is “focusing on his recovery.”
