Following is the 19th instalment in my ongoing venture to update and repost some of my previously published stories that (I think) are relevant to current times (for a full explanation as to why I’ve embarked on this fruitless exercise, scroll down to the June 1 post called Letters from the Lockdown). This entry is inspired by cold and flu season which, many experts fear, will be 10 times worse because of Covid-19.
“Viruses are carried through the air on coughs and sneezes; they live on doorknobs and railings, keypads and counters, sheets and towels, infected people’s hands and lips. And the prescription remains the same: Never touch these surfaces then your nose, mouth or eyes; wash your hands with soap and water frequently and for at least 20 seconds or use an alcohol-based hand sanitizer; steer clear of someone coughing or sneezing. If you’re the one infected, cough and sneeze into your elbow and toss that tissue right after use. And stay home!”
That was how I ended my story for Yahoo! on the common cold back in 2015, not advice for avoiding a certain coronavirus in 2020. Wow. Who could have imagined at the time that our biggest concern come fall wouldn’t be colds and flu, but a potentially lethal contagion that, nonetheless, invades us exactly in the same way, and is avoided in exactly the same way.
In the piece, I explained that a cold is an infection of the upper respiratory tract caused by more than 200 viruses, the most common being the rhinovirus, itself consisting of more than 100 variations. It’s called “common” because, according to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety, the average adult will contract up to five infections every year, and the average kid up to eight. And, just like Covid-19, “Close personal and prolonged contact is necessary for the cold viruses to spread.”
And spread they do: Every spring and fall schools and workplaces are awash in the virus, leading to missed attendance and huge costs to our economy. Sound familiar? Still, while scientists the world over are feverishly working to create a vaccine for Covid-19, there is still no cure for the common cold. My expert for the piece, Dr. Caroline Quach, who was co-director of the Vaccine Study Centre and Associate Infection Control Physician for Child and Adolescent Services at McGill University’s Heath Centre, explained that, “There are currently too many viruses that cause the common cold and there is no single agent that could actually treat them all, [and] there are currently no vaccines under development for most of the viruses.”
While there are fewer human coronaviruses (that we know of), the CDC lists enough of them, first identified in the 1960s, that are serious. The one we remember most is SARS, which emerged in 2002 but was a bad memory two years later. How? Isolation, quarantine and contact tracing. If all of us would just get that through our thick heads we wouldn’t be battling this much worse coronavirus.
Now health officials are bracing for this fall and winter’s perfect storm of cold, flu and Covid, all converging to make us even more miserable. Still, other experts predict it won’t be so bad, mainly because if we all (ha-ha) follow the recommendations of these health experts (masks, distance, hand-washing), we just may escape the worst of it.
In the end, however, some public health officials expect that we will never be free of this particular coronavirus. It’s just too widespread and too transmissible. According to an article in The Atlantic last August, titled, ominously, The Coronavirus is Never Going Away, “The most likely scenario is that the pandemic ends at some point — because enough people have been either infected or vaccinated — but the virus continues to circulate in lower levels around the globe. Cases will wax and wane over time. Outbreaks will pop up here and there. Even when a much-anticipated vaccine arrives, it is likely to only suppress, but never completely eradicate, the virus. (For context, consider that vaccines exist for more than a dozen human viruses but only one, smallpox, has ever been eradicated from the planet, and that took 15 years of immense global coordination.) We will probably be living with this virus for the rest of our lives. . . Even if the virus were somehow eliminated from the human population, it could keep circulating in animals — and spread to humans again.”
The article goes on to speculate that, in a best-case scenario, a vaccine and better treatments will lessen the severity and ultimately become just another seasonal respiratory virus. “In fact, virologists have wondered whether the common-cold coronaviruses also got their start as a pandemic before settling in as routine viruses.” Well, then, that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Robin Roberts 