In covid-19 news Wednesday:
- Some social-distancing measures may be needed from time to time until 2022, to keep resurgent cases of covid-19 from overwhelming the U.S. health-care system, says a study by researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Intermittent distancing may be required into 2022 unless critical care capacity is increased substantially or a treatment or vaccine becomes available,” they wrote in the journal Science. The study "looked at a range of scenarios for how the SARS-CoV-2 virus will spread over the next five years," Stat reports. "Those scenarios included variables like whether people who are infected develop short-term immunity — less than a year — or longer-term protection. But overall, the research concludes it is unlikely that life will return any time soon to the way it was before the virus’ emergence." Their model "predicts that a one-time social distancing effort of the type currently being employed in most parts of the country will not stop transmission of the virus. If treatments are developed that can prevent covid-19 patients from progressing to severe disease or if a vaccine is developed, movement restrictions could be loosened without health care capacity being overwhelmed, the researchers said." The senior author of the study, Mark Lipsitch, "said loosened restrictions could come sooner if scientists discovered that a lot more people have been infected already and have some immunity. He and his co-authors stressed how critical it is to conduct long-term serology studies designed to map out human immune responses to the virus over time. He told Stat's Helen Branswell: “On the other hand, there are some indications coming out at the moment that not every case of covid-19 infection … generates a robust immune response, which would mean that the build up of herd immunity is slower than it's anticipated here.”
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