“I don’t think we’ll be wearing masks in two to three years for this virus.” At least that’s according to Vineet Menachery, coronavirus researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He was speaking in the context of the 33-year-old Hong Kong man, who reportedly contracted the virus a second time. However, Vineet envisages four potential scenarios for COVID-19 in the future.
Vineet Menachery’s Four Scenarios for COVID-19
The researcher shared his educated guesses with Stat News on August 25, 2020. Some of his terms are of his own making, which is good because we need to think laterally. In the first instance, some of us may develop sterilizing immunity. This would mean we became auto-immune. However, infections in mucus membranes of our nose and throat don’t historically do this for the large majority of people.
Vineet thinks the second of his four scenarios for COVID-19 in the future is more likely. This is what he calls functional immunity whereby natural or artificial immunity primes our systems to fight back, and reduce severity. Under these circumstances reinfections would become mild or asymptomatic.
The Possibilities of Waning and Lost Immunity
Vineet Menachery imagines waning immunity as a state where we gradually lose our protection. However, subsequent infections would be less severe. In fact, he thinks this may be the mechanism behind the Hong Kong man we mentioned earlier. Dutch scientists have moreover observed this phenomenon occurring in four other coronaviruses over ten years.
The coronavirus researcher at University of Texas Medical Branch calls the final of his four scenarios for COVID-19 lost immunity. In terms of this version – which he considers least likely – all immunity vanishes ‘within some time frame’. However, his general consensus is COVID-19 is more likely to become the fifth coronavirus to cause common colds over time.
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