- A group of researchers estimate that eradicating COVID-19 is possible, although it would face many challenges.
- Eradication means reducing global cases to zero and keeping them there until intervention measures — such as vaccines — are no longer needed.
- While there are several effective COVID-19 vaccines, it’s uncertain how long the protection gained from these will last.
Many experts caution that, even after we roll out COVID-19 vaccines to much of the world’s population, the coronavirus that causes this disease — SARS-CoV-2 — will likely be with us for the foreseeable future.
But a group of New Zealand researchers say we shouldn’t rule out the “possibility of eradicating” COVID-19 from the world.
While this seems like a tall order — especially with the United States once again approaching 200,000 coronavirus cases a day — the researchers estimate that it would be slightly easier than eradicating polio.
However, they estimate that eradicating COVID-19 would be much harder than doing the same for smallpox.
“While our analysis is a preliminary effort with various subjective components, it does seem to put COVID-19 eradicability into the realms of being possible, especially in terms of technical feasibility,” they wrote in BMJ Global Health.
The researchers are not talking about the elimination of COVID-19 — in which a country or region gets case rates to zero, and reacts quickly to squash the occasional outbreak after that.
Eradication means reducing global cases to zero and keeping them there until intervention measures — such as vaccines — are no longer needed.
The global health community has achieved this with smallpox, which the World Health Organization
It is attempting to do the same for polio and measles.
Source: healthline