After a year-and-a-half with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s fair to assume people the world over are asking themselves the same two questions: How will this end? And when? The first case of COVID-19 was reported Dec. 1, 2019, and the cause was a then-new coronavirus later named SARS-CoV-2. SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in an animal and changed (mutated) so it could cause illness in humans. In the past, several infectious disease outbreaks have been traced to viruses originating in birds, pigs, bats and other animals that mutated to become dangerous to humans. Research continues, and more study may reveal how and why the coronavirus evolved to cause pandemic disease. There may have been a fleeting chance humans could have halted spread of SARS-2 and driven it back into nature, as happened with its cousin, SARS-1. But that door was firmly shut long ago. It also seems that another option vaccinating our way out of the pandemic is an expensive toll highway that few countries will be able to access in the near term. Some people infected with the coronavirus have mild COVID-19 illness, and others have no symptoms at all. In some cases, however, COVID-19 can lead to respiratory failure, lasting lung and heart muscle damage, nervous system problems, kidney failure or death.
In 1957, when the H2N2 pandemic swept the world, flu vaccine was mainly a tool of the military. In the pandemic of 1968, which brought us H3N2, the United States produced nearly 22 million doses of vaccine, but by the time it was ready the worst of the pandemic had passed, and demand subsided. That “too little and too late” phenomenon played out again in 2009, when the world finally had the capacity to make hundreds of millions of doses of H1N1 vaccine; some countries canceled large portions of their orders because they ended up not needing them. How did those pandemics end? The viruses didn’t go away; a descendent of the Spanish flu virus, the modern H1N1, circulates to this day, as does H3N2. Humans didn’t develop herd immunity to them, either. That’s a phenomenon by which a pathogen stops spreading because so many people are protected against it, because they’ve already been infected or vaccinated. Experience from the last four pandemics the ones mentioned above would suggest that viruses morph from pandemic pathogens to endemic sources of disease within a year and a half or two of emerging. But all of those pandemics were influenza pandemics. A different pathogen could mean we’ll see a different pattern.
There’s no historical record of how much illness and how much severe illness those other coronaviruses caused when they started to infect humans or how long it took for them to settle into an endemic state. As such, the flu pandemics are the closest thing we have to road maps. “In recent history, everything has been influenza and the timeline has been within a couple of years,” That immune system training will likely turn future Covid-19 infections into the equivalent of a cold, the authors concluded. Over time, as a degree of protection becomes more standard in adults, the people who will most commonly catch Covid will be young kids, in whom infections even now are rarely serious. That’s the pattern with human coronavirus infections. The flawed claim was made in a series of viral videos claiming to show magnets attracted to the arms of alleged jab recipients. Several clips said the supposed phenomenon was proof that people were microchipped, while others provided no explanation for the “magnet challenge”. Only one video named a specific vaccine, claiming the individual on camera had received the Pfizer/BioNTech shot. Many other shots do have small amounts of aluminum, which does not stick to magnets, but Oxford University researchers say this is no more harmful than the minimal quantities found naturally in almost all foods and drinking water. Medical professionals at the Meedan Health Desk said: “The amount of metal that would need to be in a vaccine for it to attract a magnet is much more substantial than the amounts that could be present in a vaccine's small dose”