Covid may never completely go away but become seasonal like the flu or colds

Will COVID-19 become seasonal, like the flu? Here's what infectious disease experts think will happen in the years to come. TODAY.com

It's not guaranteed, but it's looking more like the winter months may become cold, flu and COVID-19 season.

Vaccines promise to defang the new coronavirus, taming it so that it's unable to cause serious disease and deaths, or threaten hospitals' ability to deal with patients.

Herd immunity may be reached in a few months, but what happens next isn't easy to predict.

Experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, say it’s likely to stay and become an endemic disease — one that occurs frequently at a predictable rate in a specific area, like the common cold in North America or malaria in Africa — though it will circulate at much lower levels, produce milder symptoms and become much more manageable than when it first emerged.

“I doubt we are going to eradicate this,” Fauci said in November.

When the journal Nature recently polled more than 100 immunologists, infectious disease researchers and virologists, 89% thought the new coronavirus would become endemic.

Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security in Baltimore and a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America, agreed.

“I've never thought it would go away. This is an efficiently spreading respiratory virus that comes from a family of viruses, of which four others cause 25% of our common colds. It’s established itself in the human population,” Adalja told TODAY.

“But what will happen is that it will be no longer able to kill people at the rate that it is currently doing. It will still be here — we will still see cases, we will still have issues with it — but it will never be a public health emergency the way it is now.”

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