• Question: Do you think covid will end up like a cold or flu later in the future?

    Asked by LowennaF on 8 Jan 2022.
    • Photo: Xin Ge

      Xin Ge answered on 8 Jan 2022:

      I think we still don’t know enough about the long-term effect of this virus to answer this question confidently (and it keeps mutating!). Its difference from normal flu that I am really concerned about is those side effects. Some patients with severe symptoms, even after recovering from the disease, got a decline in lung, kidney, and heart function. Some of them lost their smell and taste to different extents which makes life really difficult. These are consequences we don’t usually get from normal flu. Hopefully with the development of technology better and better vaccines/other tools will come out protecting us from it, but there will still be risks.

    • Photo: Chris Budd

      Chris Budd answered on 8 Jan 2022:

      I hope so, but don’t really know

    • Photo: Valerie Vancollie

      Valerie Vancollie answered on 8 Jan 2022:

      While this is a possibility, it’s by no means certain that covid will go this way.

      Viruses evolve to become better at replicating and spreading. This might mean becoming less deadly and so more like a cold/flu, but not necessarily. Covid spreads most before people become sick enough to end up in hospital, therefore it might not have the incentive to become a milder disease.

      The biggest evolutionary push it has at the moment is to overcome immunity caused by either previous infection or the vaccines. So this will pressure it to change. Hopefully that change will also mean becoming milder for us, but I think our best bet is still to look for new means of treating Covid-19, preventing people from catching the virus or fighting it off better.

    • Photo: Toby Bonvoisin

      Toby Bonvoisin answered on 10 Jan 2022:

      Colds are caused by a wide variety of viruses, some of them similar to covid. There was a pandemic in the 19th century known as the “Russian flu” which killed about a million people worldwide, and some evidence suggests that it may have been caused by another coronavirus called OC43 which is now a frequent cause of the mild common cold. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1889-1890_pandemic)

      As Valerie stated, viruses don’t necessarily evolve to become less deadly. HIV is an important example of a serious pandemic virus which has not evolved to become less deadly, we just have very good treatments for it these days.

      The main thing that should make covid more similar to cold viruses is the immunity built up in the population, both from vaccinations and past infection (which isn’t the case for HIV). Hopefully, future variants will evolve to be more transmissible but not to be more deadly, but we still can’t be sure!

      Influenza, by contrast, is a very different virus that mutates more quickly than coronaviruses, leading to new and often quite severe outbreaks every winter. Coronaviruses have a error-checking protein that reduces how quickly they mutate. Hopefully, this will mean that they won’t evolve to become as rapidly changing as the flu, but again, nature often throws up surprises and we can’t be certain!

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