Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States’ top infectious diseases expert, has warned that the US could be grappling with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic for as long as a year to come. While the vaccination campaign in the US is picking up steam and raising hope that the pandemic itself could be over in as soon as a few months, some things would likely take much longer to get back to normal than others.
Face Masks in 2022?
For one thing, Fauci warns, we might all still be wearing face masks in public well into 2022. During an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, Dr. Fauci expressed that he believed the vaccine rollout could have the US back to “a significant degree of normality” by the end of 2021. However, that doesn’t mean that all of the changes to daily life brought on by the virus will simply vanish overnight.
“When it goes way down and the overwhelming majority of the people in the population are vaccinated, then I would feel comfortable in saying, you know, ‘We need to pull back on the masks'” Fauci said. He explained that the goal should be to get the virus to a point of almost zero circulation, where there is no immediate threat of community spread, before recommending people take off their masks.
Disease experts agree, the best way to crush the community spread of COVID is an aggressive combination of social distancing, mask-wearing and vaccination rollout. However, it might not be as simple as hunkering down for another month or two.
Pandemic Here to Stay?
Many disease experts have warned that the coronavirus could be settling in for the long haul, potentially becoming endemic like the flu or the common cold. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that lockdowns and death tolls like we’ve been seeing have to become the norm. Thanks to a combination of natural immunity and vaccines, it’s possible that COVID-19 just becomes another minor illness that gives you the sniffles once every few years.
Illnesses like the common cold and the flu, at one point in time, wreaked havoc on populations. In 1918, a flu epidemic claimed millions of lives in the aftermath of World War I. That same strain of the flu exists today, and never causes the kind of loss of life it did 100 years ago. This is because there is a flu vaccine and many people get the illness as children, building up a natural immunity.
