Three potential futures for Covid-19: recurring small outbreaks, a monster wave, persistent crisis

Three potential futures for Covid-19: recurring small outbreaks, a monster wave, or a persistent crisis
STAT by SHARON BEGLEY MAY 1, 2020

As epidemiologists attempt to scope out what Covid-19 has in store for the U.S. this summer and beyond, they see several potential futures...But while these scenarios diverge on key details — how much transmission will decrease over the summer, for instance, and how many people have already been infected (and possibly acquired immunity) — they almost unanimously foresee a world that, even when the current outbreak temporarily abates, looks and feels nothing like the world of just three months ago..

Scenario One: Small waves as far as the eye can see
In this future, the current peak in Covid-19 cases is followed over the next two years by crest and dip, crest and dip. The crests will be less than half the size of this spring’s outbreak, with some of the highest numbers coinciding with flu season next fall and troughs this summer and next. There will likely be regional variation due to factors including random outbreaks, the bad luck of having super-spreaders, and too little testing and contact tracing to extinguish new outbreaks before they explode...

Scenario Two: History redux
March 1918 brought the first, moderate wave of the Spanish flu. Cases fell over that summer, but six months later, in the fall, the epidemic exploded. That was followed by smaller peaks in early 1919...In this scenario, rather than reappearing throughout the year as the crests and troughs of the first scenario, Covid-19 would return with more ferocity in the late summer and fall and then dissipate...The precipitous, and lasting, fall-off would have two causes. First, so many people would be infected in the moderate first wave (now) and the gargantuan second wave (peaking around October) that the population might approach herd immunity. Second, the second wave, Osterholm said, “would absolutely take the health system down.”

Scenario Three: The worst Groundhog Day
If everything breaks wrong...this the “slow burn” scenario...The waves keep coming because the size of the outbreaks that follow the current one are smaller than in the monster-wave second scenario...No past influenza pandemic has ever followed this pattern. There are two reasons Covid-19 might..One is biological: Coronaviruses, as shown by the four endemic ones, are frighteningly adept at continuing to circulate and never disappearing (the SARS coronavirus in the early 2000s was an exception)...The other is sociological: There are real questions about society’s capacity to withstand another economic shutdown, let alone repeated ones...

Much more here and worth the read.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/01/three-potential-futures-for-covid-19/

While this article was released on Friday, I thought it worth sharing.