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Asked by LowennaF on 7 Jan 2022.
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Jonny Coates answered on 7 Jan 2022:
It’s possible but there are no guarantees. It will certainly become more normal in how we live life though. The hope is that we will have really good treatments and that a yearly booster will be enough to keep everyone safe.
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Melanie Krause answered on 8 Jan 2022:
That would mean that new variants of the virus would cause less severe disease. It could be.. some thought that was the case with the Omicron variant but that one is still very harmful and also more infectious. I think more and better medication will be developed that can prevent severe disease when you are infected so hopefully people won’t have to die from it anymore.
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Amy Mason answered on 10 Jan 2022:
This is really hard to answer.
Covid *might* mutate to become less severe i.e. make fewer people very sick. But it also might not.
So far, Alpha was more than original covid, Delta even more severe than that, and Omicron less severe than Alpha but still worse than original covid. So it is jumping around a lot.
There was an historic theory that all viruses get less severe and more infectious over time. The argument was this would mean they can spread better. However it’s not thought to be true anymore. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_virulence for more information on that.
You might like this article on comparing covid varients to other historic diseases like flu and measles, although it is not an easy read: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03619-8
One thing I do know is that every pandemic in history ended. We will find a new stable state – it may been living differently to how we did before in lots of ways, but it will feel normal and predictable again.
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Samuel Ellis answered on 11 Jan 2022:
I hope so, but there is no guarantee. There are interesting theories that other coronaviruses, which now usually cause only colds, were also very deadly when they first jumped from animals to people a long time ago as we did not have immunity
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