The Omicron variant is spreading rapidly. The world’s reaction has been an unpleasant mixture of dread, fatigue, and déjà vu. There have been various other instances when the world has faced the pandemic situation & how was it put to an end, as reported by LA Times.
Variant of concern
This started as a story about what happens after a pandemic ends.
A one-term president plagued by scandals after he left office.
By September, some states had more hospitalized COVID patients than they did during the winter surge.
In late November, the World Health Organization announced a new “variant of concern”: Omicron, which is currently on the cusp of pummeling California.
I said I didn’t think it was a good time to write a story in which the premise was “this pandemic is over, now what?”
And how might we get ourselves out of this one?
Spanish flu
How it started: Unclear, but probably not in Spain.
A third of the world’s population was believed to have contracted the Spanish flu during that pandemic, and it had a case-fatality rate of as high as 10-20% globally and 2.5% in the United States.
As a society, we accept a certain amount of death from known diseases.
That people were washing hands, working from home and socially distancing in the winter 2020 flu season likely contributed to the fact that it was a comparably light flu season.
One strain may have been completely extinguished.
How it ended: Endemic
Polio
How it started: The first documented polio epidemic in the United States was in 1894.
Polio reached pandemic levels by the 1940s.
There were more than 600,000 cases of polio in the United States in the 20th century, and nearly 60,000 deaths — a case fatality rate of 9.8%.
Polio was highly contagious: In a household with an infected adult or child, 90% to 100% of susceptible people would develop evidence in their blood of also having been infected.
A small number of people who got that vaccine got polio from it.
It was a “whole sense of the greater good, that this was the only way out of this terrible scourge,” Cannon said.
How it ended: Vaccination
Smallpox
How it started: The disease had been observed in the Eastern hemisphere dating to as early as 1157 BCE, and European colonizers first brought smallpox to North America’s previously unexposed Native population in the early 1500s.
An enslaved man named Onesimus is believed to have introduced the concept of smallpox inoculation to North America in 1721 when he told slave owner Cotton Mather that he had undergone it in West Africa.
One doctor who inoculated 287 patients reported only 2% of them died of smallpox, compared to a 14.8% death rate among the general population.
It demonstrated that the vaccines were not 100% effective in everyone forever: 47-year-old Eugene Le Bar, the first fatality, had a smallpox vaccine scar.
Israel Weinstein, the city’s health commissioner, held a news conference urging all New Yorkers to get vaccinated against smallpox, whether for the first time or what we would now call a “booster shot.”
In 1959, the World Health Organization announced a plan to eradicate smallpox globally with vaccinations.
How it ended: Vaccination
HIV/AIDS
How it started: In 1981, the CDC announced the first cases of what we would later call AIDS.
Roughly half of Americans who contracted HIV in the early 1980s died of an HIV/AIDS-related condition within two years.
Deaths from HIV peaked in the 1990s, with roughly 50,000 in 1995, and have decreased steadily since then: As of 2019, roughly 1.2 million Americans are HIV-positive; there were 5,044 deaths attributed to HIV that year.
The Reagan administration did not take HIV seriously for years.
Gay activists who encouraged their community to use condoms in the early 1980s were criticized as “sex-negative.”
She described it as a “great irony” that we identified the cause of COVID and developed a vaccine within a year, only to have people refuse it: “Anybody with HIV would tell you that the opposite is true for HIV, where despite decades now of research, we have not been able to come up with vaccines that work against this shapeshifter of a virus that is HIV, and people would be desperately pleased if there were vaccines.”
How it ended: Endemic
SARS
How it started: SARS first appeared in China in 2002 before making its way to the United States and 28 other countries.
COVID-19 is caused by a virus so similar that it’s called SARS-CoV-2.
One hundred fifteen cases of SARS were suspected in the United States; only 8 people had laboratory-confirmed cases of the disease, and none of them died.
But the diseases — and the way the government responded to them — weren’t exactly the same, said Benjamin, who worked for the CDC during the SARS epidemic.
Pandemic planning and guidance went into effect by the end of that month.
In the case of SARS, the disease stopped spreading before a vaccine or cure could be created.
How it ended: Died out after being controlled by public health measures
Swine flu
How it started: Both the Spanish flu and swine flu were caused by the same type of virus: influenza A H1N1.
So there were millions more cases of swine flu than there were of COVID-19 in the same time period, but a fraction of the fatalities.
It was first detected in California on April 15, 2009, and the CDC and the Obama administration declared public health emergencies before the end of that month.
As with COVID-19, hospital visits spiked.
Hundreds of schools closed down temporarily.
WHO declared the swine flu pandemic over in August 2010.
How it ended: Endemic
Ebola
How it started: From 2014 to 2016, 28,616 people in West Africa had Ebola, and 11,310 died — a 39.5% case fatality rate.
Unlike COVID, Ebola isn’t transmitted in the air, and there’s no asymptomatic spread.
Part of the problem in Africa, Benjamin said, was that families traditionally washed the bodies of the deceased, exposing themselves to infected fluids.
And healthcare workers who treated patients without proper protective equipment or awareness of heightened safety procedures were at risk.
An Ebola vaccine was approved by the FDA in 2019.
How it ended: Subsided after being controlled by public health measures
How will COVID end?
Big picture, “pandemics end because the disease is unable to transmit itself through people or other vectors that allow the transmission of the disease,” Benjamin said.
The most likely outcome at this point is that COVID-19 is here to stay, he said: “I think most people now think that it will be endemic for a while.”
Unlike polio, one person can unwittingly spread it to a room full of people, and not enough people are willing to get vaccinated at once to stop it in its tracks.
No one thought that about smallpox or Ebola.
Back then, she contrasted it with the way we shut down SARS: “The reason we could stop it is everybody who had SARS, you were only infectious while you were sick.”
Infected people couldn’t walk among us.
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Source: LA Times
