As the COVID-19 virus continues to mutate, medical experts say that we will likely never fully eradicate the disease, and have many wondering what the actual "end" of the pandemic will really look like.
Although it's unlikely that COVID-19 will never really go away, Dr. Monica Gandhi, Professor of Medicine and Associate Division Chief of Infectious Diseases at UCSF is advising people to not let that news get them down too much.
"If we can take away its ability to cause severe disease, then it becomes an endemic respiratory virus like four of its relatives which are common cold coronaviruses," she said on Monday's Ask an Expert with KCBS Radio's Dan Mitchinson.
Because of how transmissable it is, it's never really going to go away, but that won't be such a bad thing once we're able to control it, said Gandhi.
If the delta variant hadn't arrived on the scene, it might have been possible to eliminate the virus with the safety protocols people have been abiding by, masking, distancing, etc. Australia and New Zealand are good examples of how that strategy could have worked, said Gandhi.
"At this point, it's really about immunity," she said. "To defang the virus, strip it of its ability to cause severe disease."
States with lower vaccination rates, like Florida and Missouri, are being decimated by the delta variant, said Gandhi. Anywhere that is doing better has higher rates of immunity. We want to get to that immunity through vaccination, she said.
A new vaccine may be given if a new variant is different enough that current versions are no longer effective, she said. Right now, we aren't at that point yet.
