Vaccine
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When Will the Pandemic End?

Many people have been hesitantly beginning to ask “just how long can this whole pandemic thing go on”? While the pandemic began in the US in March, it started in earnest in late 2019 in Wuhan, China. The disease was slow to spread at first, but became a global crisis by early 2020.

After over a year of study and hardship, drug manufacturers like Pfizer have received emergency authorization to distribute their vaccines to the public. How much longer can the pandemic go on with a vaccine finally in play?

That depends largely on two main factors. The first is availability: before the end of the year, drug manufacturers hope to create millions of doses of their vaccines to send to the public.

By this time next year, they hope to have created hundreds of millions of doses, hopefully enough so that everyone who wants a vaccine can get one. In the short term, however, there is going to be a serious bottleneck: way more people want a vaccine than can acquire one currently.

Rollout of Vaccine

This leaves many health authorities in an awkward position. What do you do when you’ve got a deadly disease and only enough vaccine doses for a few people? The first order of business for most countries will be inoculating frontline medical workers.

Beyond hospital staff, many have called for vaccines to then be distributed to those at the highest risk of contracting the virus. The elderly, the immunocompromised, and the infirm are populations that health experts feel should be the next to be administered doses.

Of course, no one is naïve enough to think there won’t be a black market. Unscrupulous doctors and wealthy patients will see to it that some at the top get their vaccines well before some members of the public who need it worse.

However, authorities will work to see that as many doses as possible make it to those who truly need them.

Timeline of Recovery

The US’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, stated in late November that the upcoming vaccines made him hopeful that the US could see a return to normal activity as soon as May of 2021.

However, this will require that people receive the vaccine in a timely manner and are able to follow proper social distancing guidelines before they’re able to become inoculated.

Even expert opinions at this stage are conjecture based on data. It’s impossible to say with certainty how much longer COVID will be a part of daily life.