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This is not the way I'd imagined Bill Gates... A rare and remarkable interview with the world's second richest'It will be a minuscule portion of my wealth. It will mean they (his children) have to find their own way. They will be given an unbelievable education... But they will have to pick a job they like and go to work,' said Bill GatesTravie McCoy and Bruno Mars’s hit Billionaire reached No 3 on both sides of the Atlantic last year. The irony of the lyrics isn’t lost on either of us. They are, Gates chuckles, regularly used by his three children to poke fun at him.At 55, he has graced the cover of Forbes magazine many times. As the co-founder, with Paul Allen, of Microsoft, he grew a 1975 back-room start-up into a software behemoth worth, at its peak, $400 billion. Oprah Winfrey is a close friend; the pair meet regularly and she has discussed signing his ‘Giving Pledge’ to donate the bulk of her $2.7 billion estate to charity.And the Queen? Well, she gave him an honorary knighthood back in 2005.‘The Billionaire song is what my kids tease me with,’ he says. ‘They sing it to me. It’s funny.’They have apparently also introduced him to the ‘joys’ of Lady Gaga, ‘but the 12-year-old is always worried about the nine-year-old listening to songs with bad words. So he’s like, “No! Skip that one!” So I only know some Lady Gaga songs.’It’s probably just as well his children have a well-developed sense of humour. Gates is officially the second richest man in the world, only losing the No 1 spot to Mexican businessman Carlos Slim last year, after holding it for nearly two decades, on a technicality; he has given away $28 billion to charity, so is now personally worth ‘only’ $56 billion.But Jennifer, 15, Rory, 12, and Phoebe, nine, aren’t going to inherit anything like that much.‘I don’t think that amount of money would be good for them.’To say that Gates is socially awkward is putting it mildly. This is a man who built a multi-billion-dollar company yet seems totally unaware of the social niceties of life (pictured above: Caroline Graham with Bill)He won’t specify what they will get, but the reports that they’ll receive ‘only’ $10 million each can’t be far off, because he concedes, ‘It will be a minuscule portion of my wealth. It will mean they have to find their own way.'They will be given an unbelievable education and that will all be paid for. And certainly anything related to health issues we will take care of. But in terms of their income, they will have to pick a job they like and go to work. They are normal kids now. They do chores, they get pocket money.’He is determined that his family life should be as unaffected as possible by his fortune, and that he should be a hands-on father.‘I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I’m still fanatical, but now I’m a little less fanatical. I play tennis, I play bridge, I spend time with my family. I drive myself around town in a normal Mercedes. I’ve had a Lexus. The family has a Porsche, which is a nice car that we sometimes take out. We have a minivan and that’s what we use when it’s the five of us. My eldest daughter rides horses, so we go to a lot of three-day shows. The kids are a big part of my schedule.’'I never took a day off in my twenties. Not one. And I'm still fanatical, but now I'm a little less fanatical'Has he succumbed to the inevitable pleas from the children for an iPad, iPhone and iPod? His face hardens: ‘They have the Windows equivalent. They have a Zune music player, which is a great Windows portable player. They are not deprived children.’He mentions a U2 concert he attended the previous night in Seattle, which has been the talk of the town. He has been friends with Bono for years; along with his wife, he shared the cover of Time magazine with him in 2005, when the trio, dubbed ‘The Good Samaritans’ for their philanthropy, were named ‘Persons of the Year’.‘We went to the concert with my daughter and three of her friends, so there were six of us and we took the minivan. I drove.’Did Bono invite them backstage? A long pause, then: ‘Umm, no – actually, he stayed at our house.’ Of course.There’s something surreal about hearing Gates talk on such a personal level. Meeting him is comparable to meeting a head of state. We’re in a conference room in the sparkling new home of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, a $500 million glass-walled, eco-friendly office space which Gates jokes is ‘mostly the brainchild of my wife – I just signed all the cheques’.To say that Gates is socially awkward is putting it mildly. This is a man who built a multi-billion-dollar company yet seems totally unaware of the social niceties of life. His voice is loud and oddly high-pitched. He’s in constant motion as he speaks, rocking in his chair with his arms folded protectively in front of him, tapping his toes, fiddling with a pen. He fails to look me in the eye and doesn’t engage in small talk.I ask him whether this is it now – is Microsoft history to him, replaced in his heart by his philanthropy? He retired from the day-to-day running of Microsoft in 2008, with many believing it has since lost its edge to companies like Apple and Google.He says, ‘My full-time work for the rest of my life is this foundation.’A police mugshot of Gates after his arrest for driving without a licence in 1975Will he ever return to helm Microsoft?‘No. I’m part-time involved. But this is my job now.’His foundation has assets worth $37.1 billion, thanks in part to contributions of shares from his mentor, American ‘uber-investor’ Warren Buffett. But forget the figures. The only thing Gates wants you to know is that he intends to give it all away.Famously publicity-shy, he has granted this rare one-on-one interview to Live not – unsurprisingly – to talk about what non-Apple gadgets his children have, but to promote a ‘pledging conference’ for donors and partners of the GAVI Alliance (the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, which Gates co-founded in 2000) that kicks off in London on Monday.Hosted by David Cameron, the event marks the culmination of a drive, spearheaded by Gates, to raise $3.7 billion to vaccinate 243 million children in the world’s poorest countries against illnesses such as pneumonia and measles. Gates and Cameron are expected to announce the money has been successfully raised and, it’s hoped, will save four million lives over the next four years.His foundation began humbly in 1994 after a double whammy that made the billionaire think about his own mortality. It was the year Gates married Melinda, 46, a former Microsoft manager, and when his much-loved mother Mary, a former teacher and businesswoman, died of breast cancer.After Mary’s death, Gates’s father Bill Sr, feeling listless, started ploughing through the stacks of begging letters which had piled up at his son’s office, simply ‘for something to do’. He would send the requests he thought worthy to his son, who would then write the cheques, which Bill Sr would send out with brief notes. Bill Sr is now co-chair of the foundation, and still shows up for work every day, despite being 85.In a letter to her daughter-in-law on the eve of the wedding, Mary Gates wrote, ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected.’Gates still has the letter.Gates at work in 1984. As the co-founder, with Paul Allen, of Microsoft, he grew a 1975 back-room start-up into a software behemoth worth, at its peak, $400 billion‘It was six months before my mum died, so of course we kept that. It’s at home.’Gates decided vaccinating the world’s disadvantaged is a cost-effective, simple way to help the very poor.‘You get more bang for your buck.’Why not be the guy who cures cancer instead?‘The motto of the foundation is that every life has equal value. There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer. When you die of malaria aged three it’s different from being in your seventies, when you might die of a heart attack or you might die of cancer. And the world is putting massive amounts into cancer, so my wealth would have had a meaningless impact on that.’He is swift to praise the Prime Minister for increasing Britain’s foreign aid.‘What David Cameron is doing is something to be proud of. The UK has led the way, particularly in getting value for money. Your government went and ranked the various aid groups. Some came out poorly and some came out very strongly. GAVI was ranked one of the best of all, because if you give those vaccines to the poorest of the poor, the impact on saving lives and avoiding sickness is incredible.’Bill and Melinda Gates in India earlier this year. Their foundation has assets worth $37.1 billion. He intends to give it all awayI mildly disappoint him when I ask whether foreign aid really does go to the most deserving. What about Robert Mugabe’s henchmen skimming off millions in Zimbabwe?‘Well, no one gives aid to Zimbabwe through the Mugabe government,’ he says sharply.‘Charities like the World Food Programme go in on a direct basis. When we buy vaccines we are super-smart about what we pay. We get price reductions. We can track how many kids get the vaccines. People don’t stockpile vaccines. It’s not like you’re going to go to Mugabe’s mansion and you’d find polio vaccines in the basement and he’s going’ – at this point, marvellously, he breaks into a Dr Evil impression – ‘“Ha, ha, ha! I took it ALL!”’'When you go into a ward with kids who have cholera, it's horrific'How about countries like India, which receives billions in aid yet has 70 billionaires and a space programme?‘Countries which receive aid do graduate,’ he insists. ‘Within a generation Korea went from being a big recipient to being a big aid donor. China used to get quite a bit of aid; now it’s aid-neutral. India in the north still needs all the help we can give in terms of helping with childhood death rates, maternal deaths and polio.‘It is important to me to get out into the field. I went to Uttar Pradesh (in northern India) recently. It was a long way from this…’He waves his hand around the conference room.‘It is important to see places. When you go into a ward with kids who have cholera, it’s horrific. They are losing their vital fluids and their brains are shutting down. As a father, as a human, it’s just horrific.‘I met this girl, Hoshman, a polio victim. She’s three years old and can’t walk and never will. She’s just beginning to realise how different her life will be from the other kids’. I spoke to her mum and her older sister. Because of the work we’ve done she will be one of the last 50 kids in India to be paralysed from polio.’He smiles when I tell him one of his foundation workers told me how he helped pull himself across a river in Uttar Pradesh, and that while everyone in the Western world has heard of Bill Gates, in the Third World he’s a nobody.‘Oh, absolutely. They don’t know who I am, because it doesn’t relate to their world. I went to one place with the chief minister and someone said, “Who is this guy?”, and the chief minister said, “This is a white-skinned guy I brought with me.” If you’re a person struggling to eat and stay healthy you might have heard about Michael Jordan or Muhammad Ali, but you’ll never have heard of Bill Gates.’The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since inception has donated...His passion for aid is such that he devotes his spare time to reading about it: ‘At the moment I’m reading Getting Better by Charles Kenny, and I’m going to China soon, so I’m reading The Dragon’s Gift, about the history of Chinese aid to Africa.’Gates is a voracious reader. His famously palatial home – a £100 million, 66,000 sq ft hi-tech wonderland overlooking nearby Lake Washington – has a library packed with books. Ironically, he prefers his books in old-fashioned physical form: ‘I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book. But the electronic devices are good as well. Digital reading will completely take over. It’s lightweight and it’s fantastic for sharing. Over time it will take over.’His pride and joy is the Codex Leicester, one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, which he bought in 1994 for $30.8 million.‘I’m lucky that I own that notebook. I’ve always been amazed by Da Vinci, because he worked out science on his own. He would work by drawing things and writing down his ideas. Of course, he designed all sorts of flying machines way before you could actually build something like that.’He says it would be one of the first things he’d rescue from his home in a fire, but adds, ‘I have documents by Isaac Newton and Abraham Lincoln. I have some pretty nice art too. It would be a shame to lose any of that.’He’s still inquisitive about technology. Pointing to a large whiteboard behind my head in the conference room, he gives me a tip.‘The next big thing is definitely speech and voice recognition. You’ll be able to touch that board or speak to it and get your message to colleagues around the world. Screens are cheap.’He has his own Twitter account and Facebook page, although ‘I had a problem with Facebook, because the friend requests got out of hand’.He is friends with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, 27, who has already pledged to give most of his fortune away. Gates lets slip that Zuckerberg may be engaged to Priscilla Chan, his long-term girlfriend: ‘I didn’t say to Mark, “Give me all your money!” He was predisposed to do it and he came to me seeking advice.'His fiancée Priscilla thought about education and he gave money to Newark, New Jersey, and we did a co-grant so that some of our people who had some expertise in that field could help him out. He deserves credit. I started meaningful philanthropy in my forties. He’s starting way earlier.’I ask about his ‘legacy’, and for the first time I understand how Microsoft employees felt when Gates interrupted meetings to declare, ‘That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard!’‘Legacy is a stupid thing! I don’t want a legacy. If people look and see that childhood deaths dropped from nine million a year to four million because of our investment, then wow! I liken what I’m doing now to my old job. I worked with a lot of smart people; some things went well, some didn’t go so well. But when you see how what we did ended up empowering people, it’s a very cool thing.'I want a malaria vaccine. If we get one then we’ll have to find the money to give it to everyone, but the impact would be so huge we would find a way. Understanding science and pushing the boundaries of science is what makes me immensely satisfied. What I’m doing now involves understanding maths, risk-taking. The first half of my life was good preparation for the second half.’Gates was always described as a geek, but that seems terribly unfair in the wider context of the passions that now drive him. As I stand to leave, he laughs the label off.‘Hey, if being a geek means you’re willing to take a 400-page book on vaccines and where they work and where they don’t, and you go off and study that and you use that to challenge people to learn more, then absolutely. I’m a geek. I plead guilty. Gladly.'

Everyone agrees that a vaccine will be essential to stop the global spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. But Ofer Levy, a physician-scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital, worries that vaccines being designed today are not going to be effective enough for the people who need them most: older adults.“Whatever we develop, we’ve got to make sure it works in the elderly. Otherwise we don’t have our eye on the ball. And right now, the way vaccines are developed, the eye isn’t on the ball,” says Levy, an infectious disease doctor who directs the Precision Vaccines Program at Boston Children’s. Initial data suggest the virus that causes COVID-19 most severely affects people who are older than 60 and those who have preexisting medical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease or lung disease. A vaccine that protects young people would slow the virus’s spread, but one that protects the most vulnerable will directly save lives, he says.On the eighth floor of the Harvard Institutes of Medicine building, Levy and his colleagues are aiming to design a vaccine that will work for people of all ages. Their strategy involves testing candidates in a more realistic setting than most laboratories use and adding an adjuvant—a substance that boosts the vaccine’s effectiveness while allowing the minimum possible dosage.Dozens of labs around the world are working on vaccine candidates, but it is too early to know which ones will advance far enough to win approval—and that could take at least 12 to 18 months, experts say. Time will tell if any of them will work well on older people, says Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, a private-public partnership that provides vaccines for nearly half of the world’s children. “The reality is: we need many shots on goal here,” he says.Levy’s program at Boston Children’s had focused on flu vaccine research, but it began to pivot to coronavirus work on January 1, when David Dowling, a vaccinologist and immunologist in the group, started hearing about a strange outbreak of pneumonia in the Chinese city of Wuhan. When he learned that the virus mainly affected older people, he started to worry. “I said, ‘Everyone’s going to make a big mistake. They’re going to be developing a vaccine that works in a normal, healthy population, and they’re going to miss the elderly. And we’re all going to lose a year,’” Dowling says. He started thinking about how he could look for a vaccine-adjuvant combination for this novel pathogen.

Visit this Blog if you want to know When The Covid-19 Virus will be over. It contains all of the Details About Covid 19.When will the COVID-19 virus end?Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the COVID-19 virus end virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most living people have never witnessed. Soon, most everyone in the COVID-19 virus end United States will know someone who has been infected. Like World War II or the COVID-19 virus end 9/11 attacks, this pandemic has already imprinted itself upon the COVID-19 virus end nation’s psyche.A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the COVID-19 virus end possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the COVID-19 virus end 18 million viewers of his TED Talk. In 2018, I wrote a story for The Atlantic arguing that America was not ready for the COVID-19 virus end pandemic that would eventually come. In October, the COVID-19 virus end Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security war-gamed what might happen if a new coronavirus swept the COVID-19 virus end globe. And then one did. Hypotheticals became reality. “What if?” became “Now what?”So, now what? In the COVID-19 virus end late hours of last Wednesday, which now feels like the COVID-19 virus end distant past, I was talking about the COVID-19 virus end pandemic with a pregnant friend who was days away from her due date. We realized that her child might be one of the COVID-19 virus end first of a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19. We decided to call them Generation C.As we’ll see, Gen C’s lives will be shaped by the COVID-19 virus end choices made in the COVID-19 virus end coming weeks, and by the COVID-19 virus end losses we suffer as a result. But first, a brief reckoning. On the COVID-19 virus end Global Health Security Index, a report card that grades every country on its pandemic preparedness, the COVID-19 virus end United States has a score of 83.5—the COVID-19 virus end world’s highest. Rich, strong, developed, America is supposed to be the COVID-19 virus end readiest of nations. That illusion has been shattered. Despite months of advance warning as the COVID-19 virus end virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed.“No matter what, a virus [like SARS-CoV-2] was going to test the COVID-19 virus end resilience of even the COVID-19 virus end most well-equipped health systems,” says Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious-diseases physician at the COVID-19 virus end Boston University School of Medicine. More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza, the COVID-19 virus end new coronavirus is also stealthier, spreading from one host to another for several days before triggering obvious symptoms. To contain such a pathogen, nations must develop a test and use it to identify infected people, isolate them, and trace those they’ve had contact with. That is what South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong did to tremendous effect. It is what the COVID-19 virus end United States did not.As my colleagues Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer have reported, the COVID-19 virus end Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed and distributed a faulty test in February. Independent labs created alternatives, but were mired in bureaucracy from the COVID-19 virus end FDA. In a crucial month when the COVID-19 virus end American caseload shot into the COVID-19 virus end tens of thousands, only hundreds of people were tested. That a biomedical powerhouse like the COVID-19 virus end U.S. should so thoroughly fail to create a very simple diagnostic test was, quite literally, unimaginable. “I’m not aware of any simulations that I or others have run where we [considered] a failure of testing,” says Alexandra Phelan of Georgetown University, who works on legal and policy issues related to infectious diseases.The testing fiasco was the COVID-19 virus end original sin of America’s pandemic failure, the COVID-19 virus end single flaw that undermined every other countermeasure. If the COVID-19 virus end country could have accurately tracked the COVID-19 virus end spread of the COVID-19 virus end virus, hospitals could have executed their pandemic plans, girding themselves by allocating treatment rooms, ordering extra supplies, tagging in personnel, or assigning specific facilities to deal with COVID-19 cases. None of that happened. Instead, a health-care system that already runs close to full capacity, and that was already challenged by a severe flu season, was suddenly faced with a virus that had been left to spread, untracked, through communities around the COVID-19 virus end country. Overstretched hospitals became overwhelmed. Basic protective equipment, such as masks, gowns, and gloves, began to run out. Beds will soon follow, as will the COVID-19 virus end ventilators that provide oxygen to patients whose lungs are besieged by the COVID-19 virus end virus.With little room to surge during a crisis, America’s health-care system operates on the COVID-19 virus end assumption that unaffected states can help beleaguered ones in an emergency. That ethic works for localized disasters such as hurricanes or wildfires, but not for a pandemic that is now in all 50 states. Cooperation has given way to competition; some worried hospitals have bought out large quantities of supplies, in the COVID-19 virus end way that panicked consumers have bought out toilet paper.Partly, that’s because the COVID-19 virus end White House is a ghost town of scientific expertise. A pandemic-preparedness office that was part of the COVID-19 virus end National Security Council was dissolved in 2018. On January 28, Luciana Borio, who was part of that team, urged the COVID-19 virus end government to “act now to prevent an American epidemic,” and specifically to work with the COVID-19 virus end private sector to develop fast, easy diagnostic tests. But with the COVID-19 virus end office shuttered, those warnings were published in The Wall Street Journal, rather than spoken into the COVID-19 virus end president’s ear. Instead of springing into action, America sat idle.Derek Thompson: America is acting like a failed stateRudderless, blindsided, lethargic, and uncoordinated, America has mishandled the COVID-19 virus end COVID-19 crisis to a substantially worse degree than what every health expert I’ve spoken with had feared. “Much worse,” said Ron Klain, who coordinated the COVID-19 virus end U.S. response to the COVID-19 virus end West African Ebola outbreak in 2014. “Beyond any expectations we had,” said Lauren Sauer, who works on disaster preparedness at Johns Hopkins Medicine. “As an American, I’m horrified,” said Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the COVID-19 virus end Vaccine Alliance. “The U.S. may end up with the COVID-19 virus end worst outbreak in the COVID-19 virus end industrialized world.”I. The Next MonthsHaving fallen behind, it will be difficult—but not impossible—for the COVID-19 virus end United States to catch up. To an extent, the COVID-19 virus end near-term future is set because COVID-19 is a slow and long illness. People who were infected several days ago will only start showing symptoms now, even if they isolated themselves in the COVID-19 virus end meantime. Some of those people will enter intensive-care units in early April. As of last weekend, the COVID-19 virus end nation had 17,000 confirmed cases, but the COVID-19 virus end actual number was probably somewhere between 60,000 and 245,000. Numbers are now starting to rise exponentially: As of Wednesday morning, the COVID-19 virus end official case count was 54,000, and the COVID-19 virus end actual case count is unknown. Health-care workers are already seeing worrying signs: dwindling equipment, growing numbers of patients, and doctors and nurses who are themselves becoming infected.Italy and Spain offer grim warnings about the COVID-19 virus end future. Hospitals are out of room, supplies, and staff. Unable to treat or save everyone, doctors have been forced into the COVID-19 virus end unthinkable: rationing care to patients who are most likely to survive, while letting others die. The U.S. has fewer hospital beds per capita than Italy. A study released by a team at Imperial College London concluded that if the COVID-19 virus end pandemic is left unchecked, those beds will all be full by late April. By the COVID-19 virus end end of June, for every available critical-care bed, there will be roughly 15 COVID-19 patients in need of one. By the COVID-19 virus end end of the COVID-19 virus end summer, the COVID-19 virus end pandemic will have directly killed 2.2 million Americans, notwithstanding those who will indirectly die as hospitals are unable to care for the COVID-19 virus end usual slew of heart attacks, strokes, and car accidents. This is the COVID-19 virus end worst-case scenario. To avert it, four things need to happen—and quickly.The first and most important is to rapidly produce masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment. If health-care workers can’t stay healthy, the COVID-19 virus end rest of the COVID-19 virus end response will collapse. In some places, stockpiles are already so low that doctors are reusing masks between patients, calling for donations from the COVID-19 virus end public, or sewing their own homemade alternatives. These shortages are happening because medical supplies are made-to-order and depend on byzantine international supply chains that are currently straining and snapping. Hubei province in China, the COVID-19 virus end epicenter of the COVID-19 virus end pandemic, was also a manufacturing center of medical masks.In the COVID-19 virus end U.S., the COVID-19 virus end Strategic National Stockpile—a national larder of medical equipment—is already being deployed, especially to the COVID-19 virus end hardest-hit states. The stockpile is not inexhaustible, but it can buy some time. Donald Trump could use that time to invoke the COVID-19 virus end Defense Production Act, launching a wartime effort in which American manufacturers switch to making medical equipment. But after invoking the COVID-19 virus end act last Wednesday, Trump has failed to actually use it, reportedly due to lobbying from the COVID-19 virus end U.S. Chamber of Commerce and heads of major corporations.Some manufacturers are already rising to the COVID-19 virus end challenge, but their efforts are piecemeal and unevenly distributed. “One day, we’ll wake up to a story of doctors in City X who are operating with bandanas, and a closet in City Y with masks piled into it,” says Ali Khan, the COVID-19 virus end dean of public health at the COVID-19 virus end University of Nebraska Medical Center. A “massive logistics and supply-chain operation [is] now needed across the COVID-19 virus end country,” says Thomas Inglesby of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That can’t be managed by small and inexperienced teams scattered throughout the COVID-19 virus end White House. The solution, he says, is to tag in the COVID-19 virus end Defense Logistics Agency—a 26,000-person group that prepares the COVID-19 virus end U.S. military for overseas operations and that has assisted in past public-health crises, including the COVID-19 virus end 2014 Ebola outbreak.This agency can also coordinate the COVID-19 virus end second pressing need: a massive rollout of COVID-19 tests. Those tests have been slow to arrive because of five separate shortages: of masks to protect people administering the COVID-19 virus end tests; of nasopharyngeal swabs for collecting viral samples; of extraction kits for pulling the COVID-19 virus end virus’s genetic material out of the COVID-19 virus end samples; of chemical reagents that are part of those kits; and of trained people who can give the COVID-19 virus end tests. Many of these shortages are, again, due to strained supply chains. The U.S. relies on three manufacturers for extraction reagents, providing redundancy in case any of them fails—but all of them failed in the COVID-19 virus end face of unprecedented global demand. Meanwhile, Lombardy, Italy, the COVID-19 virus end hardest-hit place in Europe, houses one of the COVID-19 virus end largest manufacturers of nasopharyngeal swabs.Some shortages are being addressed. The FDA is now moving quickly to approve tests developed by private labs. At least one can deliver results in less than an hour, potentially allowing doctors to know if the COVID-19 virus end patient in front of them has COVID-19. The country “is adding capacity on a daily basis,” says Kelly Wroblewski of the COVID-19 virus end Association of Public Health Laboratories.On March 6, Trump said that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” That was (and still is) untrue, and his own officials were quick to correct him. Regardless, anxious people still flooded into hospitals, seeking tests that did not exist. “People wanted to be tested even if they weren’t symptomatic, or if they sat next to someone with a cough,” says Saskia Popescu of George Mason University, who works to prepare hospitals for pandemics. Others just had colds, but doctors still had to use masks to examine them, burning through their already dwindling supplies. “It really stressed the COVID-19 virus end health-care system,” Popescu says. Even now, as capacity expands, tests must be used carefully. The first priority, says Marc Lipsitch of Harvard, is to test health-care workers and hospitalized patients, allowing hospitals to quell any ongoing fires. Only later, once the COVID-19 virus end immediate crisis is slowing, should tests be deployed in a more widespread way. “This isn’t just going to be: Let’s get the COVID-19 virus end tests out there!” Inglesby says.When will the COVID-19 virus end coronavirus pandemic come to an end? The question is on everyone’s mind, and while astrologers and politicians have answers, few scientists want to be drawn into hazarding a prediction.According to Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan’s recent remarks, the COVID-19 virus end spread of coronavirus has already been contained in India because “half the COVID-19 virus end total cases are from three states only and another 30 per cent from seven others.” But India has crossed two million Covid-19 positive cases and the COVID-19 virus end graph continues to rise.How the COVID-19 virus end pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyondThis coronavirus is here for the COVID-19 virus end long haul — here’s what scientists predict for the COVID-19 virus end next months and years.The world has been in pandemic mode for a year and a half. The virus continues to spread at a slow burn; intermittent lockdowns are the COVID-19 virus end new normal. An approved vaccine offers six months of protection, but international deal-making has slowed its distribution. An estimated 250 million people have been infected worldwide, and 1.75 million are dead.Scenarios such as this one imagine how the COVID-19 virus end COVID-19 pandemic might play out1. Around the COVID-19 virus end world, epidemiologists are constructing short- and long-term projections as a way to prepare for, and potentially mitigate, the COVID-19 virus end spread and impact of SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus end virus that causes COVID-19. Although their forecasts and timelines vary, modellers agree on two things: COVID-19 is here to stay, and the COVID-19 virus end future depends on a lot of unknowns, including whether people develop lasting immunity to the COVID-19 virus end virus, whether seasonality affects its spread, and — perhaps most importantly — the COVID-19 virus end choices made by governments and individuals. “A lot of places are unlocking, and a lot of places aren’t. We don’t really yet know what’s going to happen,” says Rosalind Eggo, an infectious-disease modeller at the COVID-19 virus end London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).“The future will very much depend on how much social mixing resumes, and what kind of prevention we do,” says Joseph Wu, a disease modeller at the COVID-19 virus end University of Hong Kong. Recent models and evidence from successful lockdowns suggest that behavioural changes can reduce the COVID-19 virus end spread of COVID-19 if most, but not necessarily all, people comply.Last week, the COVID-19 virus end number of confirmed COVID-19 infections passed 15 million globally, with around 650,000 deaths. Lockdowns are easing in many countries, leading some people to assume that the COVID-19 virus end pandemic is ending, says Yonatan Grad, an epidemiologist at the COVID-19 virus end Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. “But that’s not the COVID-19 virus end case. We’re in for a long haul.”If immunity to the COVID-19 virus end virus lasts less than a year, for example, similar to other human coronaviruses in circulation, there could be annual surges in COVID-19 infections through to 2025 and beyond. Here, Nature explores what the COVID-19 virus end science says about the COVID-19 virus end months and years to come.What happens in the COVID-19 virus end near future?The pandemic is not playing out in the COVID-19 virus end same way from place to place. Countries such as China, New Zealand and Rwanda have reached a low level of cases — after lockdowns of varying lengths — and are easing restrictions while watching for flare-ups. Elsewhere, such as in the COVID-19 virus end United States and Brazil, cases are rising fast after governments lifted lockdowns quickly or never activated them nationwide.The latter group has modellers very worried. In South Africa, which now ranks fifth in the COVID-19 virus end world for total COVID-19 cases, a consortium of modellers estimates2 that the COVID-19 virus end country can expect a peak in August or September, with around one million active cases, and cumulatively as many as 13 million symptomatic cases by early November. In terms of hospital resources, “we’re already breaching capacity in some areas, so I think our best-case scenario is not a good one”, says Juliet Pulliam, director of the COVID-19 virus end South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis at Stellenbosch University.Last week, the COVID-19 virus end number of confirmed COVID-19 infections passed 15 million globally, with around 650,000 deaths. Lockdowns are easing in many countries, leading some people to assume that the COVID-19 virus end pandemic is ending, says Yonatan Grad, an epidemiologist at the COVID-19 virus end Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts. “But that’s not the COVID-19 virus end case. We’re in for a long haul.”If immunity to the COVID-19 virus end virus lasts less than a year, for example, similar to other human coronaviruses in circulation, there could be annual surges in COVID-19 infections through to 2025 and beyond. Here, Nature explores what the COVID-19 virus end science says about the COVID-19 virus end months and years to come.What happens in the COVID-19 virus end near future?The pandemic is not playing out in the COVID-19 virus end same way from place to place. Countries such as China, New Zealand and Rwanda have reached a low level of cases — after lockdowns of varying lengths — and are easing restrictions while watching for flare-ups. Elsewhere, such as in the COVID-19 virus end United States and Brazil, cases are rising fast after governments lifted lockdowns quickly or never activated them nationwide.The latter group has modellers very worried. In South Africa, which now ranks fifth in the COVID-19 virus end world for total COVID-19 cases, a consortium of modellers estimates2 that the COVID-19 virus end country can expect a peak in August or September, with around one million active cases, and cumulatively as many as 13 million symptomatic cases by early November. In terms of hospital resources, “we’re already breaching capacity in some areas, so I think our best-case scenario is not a good one”, says Juliet Pulliam, director of the COVID-19 virus end South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis at Stellenbosch University.Health is the COVID-19 virus end real wealthGoing on a long journey, opting for a new study or taking the COVID-19 virus end step to become an entrepreneur - the COVID-19 virus end world is at our feet. In the COVID-19 virus end meantime, we swipe and like to find love and new friends.To get the COVID-19 virus end most out of life we want to feel fit: physically and mentally. Not striving for a six-pack, but for more energy and resilience. So that we can sprint to the COVID-19 virus end train without any problems and lift heavy groceries up the COVID-19 virus end stairs, but also be mentally resilient to deal with setbacks.Women's Health is the COVID-19 virus end largest health glossy that inspires, informs and challenges you to push your boundaries - because the COVID-19 virus end most beautiful things happen outside your comfort zone.Benefits for subscribersYou will receive every brand new edition of Women's Health before the COVID-19 virus end number hits the COVID-19 virus end storeYou have free access to the COVID-19 virus end tablet and smartphone version of your favorite health magazine via at any time of the COVID-19 virus end day and read back there for up to 3 months immediately after registration.As a subscriber you benefit from exclusive offers and discountsYou now also receive a 50% discount on a second magazine subscriptionIs the COVID-19 virus end sharp drop in India's coronavirus cases as dramatic and curious as some believe?Is the COVID-19 virus end epidemic firmly in retreat in a country where many early modellers had predicted millions of deaths due to Covid-19?In October, I had written extensively on why the COVID-19 virus end epidemic appeared to be slowing down in India. Cases had hit a record peak in the COVID-19 virus end middle of September - there were more than a million active cases. After that daily deaths and caseloads began declining despite consistent testing and some short and fierce spikes of infections in cities like Delhi.The situation has markedly improved since.By the COVID-19 virus end middle of last week, India was barely counting an average of 10,000 Covid cases every day. The seven-day rolling average of daily deaths from the COVID-19 virus end disease slid to below 100. More than half of India's states were not reporting any Covid deaths. On Tuesday, Delhi, once an infection hotspot, did not record a single Covid death, for the COVID-19 virus end first time in 10 months.So far, India has recorded more than 10 million infections - the COVID-19 virus end second-highest in the COVID-19 virus end world after the COVID-19 virus end US. There have been over 150,000 reported deaths from the COVID-19 virus end disease. The number of deaths per million people stands at 112, much lower than what has been reported in Europe or North America. It is also clear that the COVID-19 virus end decline in cases is not because of lower testing.Most pandemics typically rise and fall in a bell-shaped curve. India has been no exception. Also, it has seen a high proportion of cases and deaths of people above the COVID-19 virus end age of 65 living in densely packed cities, hewing to infection trends around the COVID-19 virus end world."There's nothing unusual about infections dropping in India. There's no miracle here," says Dr Shahid Jameel, a leading virologist.Experts say there's no dearth of possible causes - explained below - for the COVID-19 virus end relatively low severity of the COVID-19 virus end disease and its toll."We still don't have causal explanations. But we do know India as a nation is far from herd immunity," says Bhramar Mukherjee, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the COVID-19 virus end University of Michigan who has been closely tracking the COVID-19 virus end pandemic. Herd immunity happens when a large portion of a community becomes immune to a disease through vaccination or through the COVID-19 virus end mass spread of the COVID-19 virus end disease.Why is India far from reaching herd immunity?The latest sero survey - studies that pick up antibodies - suggests 21% of adults and 25% of children have been already infected with the COVID-19 virus end virus.It also found that 31% of people living in slums, 26% of non-slum urban populations and 19% living in rural areas have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus end virus. That's far below 50% - a figure reported by some of the COVID-19 virus end bigger cities, such as Pune and Delhi. Here, there is evidence of much higher levels of exposure to the COVID-19 virus end virus, hinting that these places are likely closer to herd immunity.But experts say the COVID-19 virus end numbers are still too low."There is no region in the COVID-19 virus end country which can be deemed to have attained herd immunity, though small pockets may exist," Dr K Srinath Reddy, president of the COVID-19 virus end Public Health Foundation of India, a Delhi-based think tank, told me.So people who have still not been exposed to the COVID-19 virus end virus in places with high prevalence of infection may remain protected in their communities but would become vulnerable if they travelled to areas where transmission levels are lower.So why are cases dropping?Experts say there could be a couple of different reasons.For one, India has seen a "patchwork" pandemic with cases waxing and waning at different times in different parts of the COVID-19 virus end country.More people have been infected in cities - especially in packed slums - and in developed, urbanised districts than in smaller towns or villages. In all of these places, their exposure to the COVID-19 virus end virus has varied significantly. Cases have now slowed down in most urban areas, but rural India still remains a bit of a mystery."My hunch is exposure to the COVID-19 virus end infection is much higher than what the COVID-19 virus end surveys indicate. Also we should not be taking India as one. In some cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, and Bangalore, up to 60% of people have been found with antibodies to the COVID-19 virus end virus. So it's all very uneven," says Dr Shahid Jameel, a leading virologist.The other explanation is that India has and continues to miss lots of cases, mainly because a large number of infected people have no symptoms at all or have a very mild infection."If we have had a massive number of very mild or asymptomatic cases, we might have reached a threshold of herd immunity already. If that is the COVID-19 virus end case we still have to explain, why so many Indian cases have been so mild?" asks Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at Delhi's Centre for Policy Research, who has been studying the COVID-19 virus end pandemic.Is the COVID-19 virus end low death rate a mystery?Most scientists believe that many more Indians died of the COVID-19 virus end infection than what the COVID-19 virus end official figures reveal. India has a poor record of certifying deaths and a large number of people die at home.But even such a scale of under-reporting has not caused public panic or overwhelmed hospitals. Consider this. India has some 600,000 villages. Even one undiagnosed and unreported death from Covid in each village every day would not overwhelm the COVID-19 virus end public health system.India imposed a sweeping, early shutdown in late March to halt the COVID-19 virus end spread of the COVID-19 virus end virus. Scientists believe that the COVID-19 virus end shutdown, which stretched to nearly 70 days, did prevent a lot of infections and deaths.Transmission slowed in the COVID-19 virus end badly-hit cities because of the COVID-19 virus end expanded use of face masks, physical distancing, school and office closures and people working from home.Scientists have also attributed lower fatalities to a young population, protective immunity, a vast rural populace with negligible links with cities, genetics, poor hygiene, and ample lung protecting protein.A number of studies have said the COVID-19 virus end infection is largely spread by the COVID-19 virus end virus floating indoors, tiny droplets hanging in stagnant air in poorly ventilated rooms.But more than 65% of Indians live and work in the COVID-19 virus end countryside. Brazil, for example, is nearly three-times more urbanised than India, and that could partly explain the COVID-19 virus end high number of cases and fatalities there, say scientists.In cities, the COVID-19 virus end overwhelming majority of India's workforce is engaged in the COVID-19 virus end informal economy. This means many of them, such as construction workers or street vendors, do not work in closed spaces. "The transmission risks are lower for persons working in open or semi-closed ventilated spaces," Dr Reddy says.Has India avoided a second wave?It's too early to say.Some experts fear that India could see a spurt in infections with the COVID-19 virus end onset of the COVID-19 virus end monsoons, which also marks the COVID-19 virus end beginning of the COVID-19 virus end country's influenza season. It lasts from June to September and wreaks flood havoc across South Asia every year."The beginning of the COVID-19 virus end upcoming monsoon season is going to be critical. We can only make an informed assessment on whether the COVID-19 virus end pandemic has truly run its course in India after the COVID-19 virus end season is over, " says an epidemiologist who preferred to be unnamed.The real elephants in the COVID-19 virus end room, say scientists, are the COVID-19 virus end new variants of the COVID-19 virus end virus identified in South Africa, Brazil and the COVID-19 virus end UK.Since a large number of Indians have still not been exposed to Covid-19, a dominant strain could easily travel to relatively uninfected areas and trigger fresh outbreaks.India had reported more than 160 cases of the COVID-19 virus end UK variant until the COVID-19 virus end end of January. It's not clear whether the COVID-19 virus end other variants are already circulating in the COVID-19 virus end country. India could also easily have home-grown variants.The UK variant was detected in Kent in September, but became the COVID-19 virus end reason for a full-blown second wave only two months later. Since then it has been found in more than 50 countries, and is now set to become the COVID-19 virus end world's dominant strain.India has enough scientific labs, but genome sequencing is still spotty, scientists say."The variant story is the COVID-19 virus end big one. It could upset all our calculations. We need to be very vigilant, and our labs should scale up genome sequencing to look out for variants," Dr Jameel says.Clearly, India needs to speed up its vaccination drive - some six million jabs have been given in just under a month. The government aims to inoculate 300 million people by August to make sure a second wave does not result in widespread infections.And there's no room for complacency yet - doctors and scientists urge people to avoid mass gatherings and crowded areas, and continue to use face mask and practise hand hygiene.Charts by Shadab Nazmi“This is the COVID-19 virus end weapon that is going to win the COVID-19 virus end war”, declared New York Governor Andrew Cuomo about severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) vaccine BNT162b2 (Pfizer/BioNTech), as its tentative rollout begins in the COVID-19 virus end UK, the COVID-19 virus end USA, and Canada. A great achievement for sure, but this first step in what will need to be a global mass immunisation programme will not immediately end the COVID-19 virus end COVID-19 pandemic. Although control over the COVID-19 virus end infection's most harmful effects is expected and limiting its spread can be hoped for, it will likely be a few years before the COVID-19 virus end virus can be brought under control worldwide.Ideally, multiple vaccines will be approved in most countries and we will have a detailed understanding of their efficacy, the COVID-19 virus end duration of the COVID-19 virus end immunity they induce, and their effect on viral transmission. At the COVID-19 virus end time of writing, there have been efficacy reports from phase 3 trials of five vaccines (BNT162b2, mRNA-1273 [Moderna], ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 [University of Oxford and AstraZeneca], Sputnik V [Gamaleya Research Institute], and BBIBP-CorV [Sinopharm]), but the COVID-19 virus end data to support these reports have only been published in peer-reviewed journals for BNT162b2 and ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, and only the COVID-19 virus end former has been evaluated by drug regulatory authorities and approved for emergency or limited use in some countries. Despite the COVID-19 virus end lack of official assessments, Russia has started distributing Sputnik V and the COVID-19 virus end United Arab Emirates and Barhain have fully approved BBIBP-CorV, already widely distributed in China, despite uncertainties surrounding its efficacy and safety.Even for the COVID-19 virus end vaccines for which data are publicly available, many unknowns with a bearing on the COVID-19 virus end effectiveness of immunisation programmes remain. How long does immunity last? By necessity, trials have collected data for just a few months, but only long-term, post-immunisation monitoring will clarify whether the COVID-19 virus end initial vaccine doses are sufficient or further boosts are needed. Do any of the COVID-19 virus end vaccines prevent viral transmission? Such data are only available from the COVID-19 virus end ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine trial, but it was underpowered to generate firm conclusions. Still, data from participants who received a first half dose and a second full booster dose indicate fewer asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections than in the COVID-19 virus end control group, suggesting reduced transmission. Are the COVID-19 virus end vaccines safe and efficacious in populations that have not been included in trials and might be at increased risk of severe disesase, such as pregnant women? Only their inclusion in trials will answer this question. But in the COVID-19 virus end meantime, should they be vaccinated (by weighing the COVID-19 virus end risks of possible adverse reactions) or protected through shielding or herd immunity? The unknowns of how the COVID-19 virus end vaccine affects transmission makes the COVID-19 virus end possibility of achieving herd immunity through vaccination uncertain.In addition to these unknowns, the COVID-19 virus end world has never before needed to implement mass immunisation of its entire adult population. The challenges it entails range from financial, to logistic, to social and will affect how quickly and successfully the COVID-19 virus end countries that have already started distributing a vaccine—all upper-middle-income or high-income countries—will be able to start controlling the COVID-19 virus end disease. However, these countries should remember that the COVID-19 virus end pandemic will really only be over when it is under control globally. International initiatives, most notably the COVID-19 virus end COVAX Facility, are in place to support low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) in establishing vaccination programmes and ensuring equitable access to vaccine doses. However, by Dec 16, 2020, COVAX had only secured about 400 million of the COVID-19 virus end 2 billion doses needed to guarantee that 20% of the COVID-19 virus end population of participating LMICs has access to a vaccine in 2021, while the COVID-19 virus end EU, the COVID-19 virus end UK, the COVID-19 virus end USA, and Canada have already made deals with manufacturers to buy more than 50% of the COVID-19 virus end doses expected to be available in 2021, despite these countries representing only 14% of the COVID-19 virus end global population. AstraZeneca is the COVID-19 virus end only manufacturer of those whose efficacy reports have been confirmed that has pledged to sell vaccine doses to LMICs at cost. There is hope that if the COVID-19 virus end efficacies of Sputnik V and BBIBP-CorV are confirmed and these vaccines are approved, they will provide a new pool of doses for LMICs.Vaccines will be instrumental in the COVID-19 virus end control of COVID-19, but their global distribution will be challenging and their effect won't be immediate. As cases and deaths continue to rise across the COVID-19 virus end world, the COVID-19 virus end non-pharmaceutical interventions to constrain the COVID-19 virus end spread of SARS-CoV-2 that the COVID-19 virus end global population has by now become accustomed to will need to remain in place for a while longer.We know how the COVID-19 virus end COVID-19 pandemic began: Bats near Wuhan, China, hold a mix of coronavirus strains, and sometime last fall one of the COVID-19 virus end strains, opportunistic enough to cross species lines, left its host or hosts and ended up in a person. Then it was on the COVID-19 virus end loose.What no one knows yet is how the COVID-19 virus end pandemic will end. This coronavirus is unprecedented in the COVID-19 virus end combination of its easy transmissibility, a range of symptoms going from none at all to deadly, and the COVID-19 virus end extent that it has disrupted the COVID-19 virus end world. A highly susceptible population led to near exponential growth in cases. “This is a distinct and very new situation,” says epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Cobey of the COVID-19 virus end University of Chicago.But past pandemics do offer hints of the COVID-19 virus end future. While there is no one historical example to follow, humanity has gone through several large epidemics in the COVID-19 virus end past 100 or so years that eventually stopped ravaging society. The ways they came to a halt offer guidance to a world looking for ways to restore health and some sense of normalcy. Three of those experiences, Cobey and other experts say, suggest that what happens next depends on both the COVID-19 virus end evolution of the COVID-19 virus end pathogen and of the COVID-19 virus end human response to it, both biological and social.A SPREADING PROBLEMViruses are constantly mutating. Those that trigger pandemics have enough novelty that the COVID-19 virus end human immune system does not quickly recognize them as dangerous invaders. They force the COVID-19 virus end body to create a brand-new defense, involving new antibodies and other immune system components that can react to and attack the COVID-19 virus end foe. Large numbers of people get sick in the COVID-19 virus end short term, and social factors such as crowding and the COVID-19 virus end unavailability of medicine can drive those numbers even higher. Ultimately, in most cases, antibodies developed by the COVID-19 virus end immune system to fight off the COVID-19 virus end invader linger in enough of the COVID-19 virus end affected population to confer longer-term immunity and limit person-to-person viral transmission. But that can take several years, and before it happens, havoc reigns.Learning to live with a disease. The most famous example of this dynamic in modern history was the COVID-19 virus end H1N1 influenza outbreak of 1918–1919. Doctors and public health officials had far fewer weapons than they do today, and the COVID-19 virus end effectiveness of control measures such as school closures depended on how early and decisively they were implemented. Over two years and three waves, the COVID-19 virus end pandemic infected 500 million and killed between 50 million and 100 million. It ended only as natural infections conferred immunity on those who recovered.The H1N1 strain became endemic, an infectious disease that was constantly with us at less severe levels, circulating for another 40 years as a seasonal virus. It took another pandemic—H2N2 in 1957—to extinguish most of the COVID-19 virus end 1918 strain. One flu virus kicked out another one, essentially, and scientists don’t really know how. Human efforts to do the COVID-19 virus end same have failed. “Nature can do it, we cannot,” says virologist Florian Krammer of the COVID-19 virus end Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.Containment. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003 was caused not by an influenza virus but by a coronavirus, SARS-CoV, that is closely related to the COVID-19 virus end cause of the COVID-19 virus end current affliction, SARS-CoV-2. Of the COVID-19 virus end seven known human coronaviruses, four circulate widely, causing up to a third of common colds. The one that caused the COVID-19 virus end SARS outbreak was far more virulent. Thanks to aggressive epidemiological tactics such as isolating the COVID-19 virus end sick, quarantining their contacts and implementing social controls, bad outbreaks were limited to a few locations such as Hong Kong and Toronto. This containment was possible because sickness followed infection very quickly and obviously: almost all people with the COVID-19 virus end virus had serious symptoms such as fever and trouble breathing. And they transmitted the COVID-19 virus end virus after getting quite sick, not before. “Most patients with SARS were not that contagious until maybe a week after symptoms appeared,” says epidemiologist Benjamin Cowling of the COVID-19 virus end University of Hong Kong. “If they could be identified within that week and put into isolation with good infection control, there wouldn’t be onward spread.” Containment worked so well there were only 8,098 SARS cases globally and 774 deaths. The world has not seen a case since 2004.Vaccine power. When a new H1N1 influenza virus, known as swine flu, caused a pandemic in 2009, “there was an alarm bell because this was a brand-new H1N1,” Cowling says, and it was very similar to the COVID-19 virus end 1918 killer. Swine flu proved less severe than feared. In part, Krammer says, “we were lucky because the COVID-19 virus end pathogenicity of the COVID-19 virus end virus wasn’t very high.” But another important reason was that six months after the COVID-19 virus end virus appeared, scientists developed a vaccine for it.Unlike measles or smallpox vaccines, which can confer long-term immunity, flu vaccines offer only a few years of protection. Influenza viruses are slippery, mutating rapidly to escape immunity. As a result, the COVID-19 virus end vaccines must be updated every year and given regularly. But during a pandemic, even a short-term vaccine is a boon. The 2009 vaccine helped to temper a second wave of cases in the COVID-19 virus end winter. As a result, the COVID-19 virus end virus much more rapidly went the COVID-19 virus end way of the COVID-19 virus end 1918 virus, becoming a widely circulating seasonal flu, from which many people are now protected either by flu shots or by antibodies from a previous infection.THE CURRENT END GAMEProjections about how COVID-19 will play out are speculative, but the COVID-19 virus end end game will most likely involve a mix of everything that checked past pandemics: Continued social-control measures to buy time, new antiviral medications to ease symptoms, and a vaccine. The exact formula—how long control measures such as social distancing must stay in place, for instance—depends in large part on how strictly people obey restrictions and how effectively governments respond. For example, containment measures that worked for COVID-19 in places such as Hong Kong and South Korea came far too late in Europe and the COVID-19 virus end U.S. “The question of how the COVID-19 virus end pandemic plays out is at least 50 percent social and political,” Cobey says.The other 50 percent will probably come from science. Researchers have banded together like never before and are working on multiple fronts to develop remedies. If any of the COVID-19 virus end several antiviral medications currently in development prove effective, they will improve treatment options and lower the COVID-19 virus end numbers who get seriously ill or die. A technique to screen for SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies, an indicator of immunity in recovered patients, could also prove very useful. Krammer and his colleagues have developed one such test, and there are others. Previously used only in local epidemics, these new serological assays won’t end the COVID-19 virus end pandemic, but they could make it possible to spot and use antibody-rich blood as a treatment for critically ill patients; more certainly, the COVID-19 virus end tests will also get people back to work faster if those who fought off the COVID-19 virus end virus and are immune can be identified.It will take a vaccine to stop transmission. That will take time—probably a year from now. Still, there is reason to think a vaccine could work effectively. Compared with flu viruses, coronaviruses don’t have as many ways to interact with host cells. “If that interaction goes away, [the COVID-19 virus end virus] can’t replicate anymore,” Krammer says. “That’s the COVID-19 virus end advantage we have here.” It is not clear whether a vaccine will confer long-term immunity as with measles or short-term immunity as with flu shots. But “any vaccine at all would be helpful at this point,” says epidemiologist Aubree Gordon of the COVID-19 virus end University of Michigan.Unless a vaccine is administered to all of the COVID-19 virus end world’s eight billion inhabitants who are not currently sick or recovered, COVID-19 is likely to become endemic. It will circulate and make people sick seasonally—sometimes very sick. But if the COVID-19 virus end virus stays in the COVID-19 virus end human population long enough, it will start to infect children when they are young. Those cases are typically, though not always, quite mild, and so far the COVID-19 virus end children appear less likely to develop severe disease if they get reinfected as adults. The combination of vaccination and natural immunity will protect many of us. The coronavirus, like most viruses, will live on—but not as a planetary plague.Ayear ago, the COVID-19 virus end coronavirus outbreak was scaring the COVID-19 virus end world with an impending Covid-19 pandemic. There was hope that coronavirus could be contained in the COVID-19 virus end places it had reached but it spread to all parts of the COVID-19 virus end world. More than 104 million people have been infected and over 2.2 million died due to Covid-19 complications since then.Now that several Covid-19 vaccines are out and vaccination drives are being rolled out aggressively in many countries, the COVID-19 virus end question remains top of everyone’s mind is: when will the COVID-19 virus end Covid-19 pandemic end?Vaccines have raised hopes. According to a Bloomberg estimate, it will take seven years to bring Covid-19 to an end through vaccination at the COVID-19 virus end current rate. It has quoted US science officials such as Anthony Fauci as saying that vaccine coverage of 70-85 per cent population would be needed to return to normalcy.Bloomberg reported that more than 119 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines have been administered to beneficiaries worldwide. Bloomberg's Vaccine Tracker shows that Israel, the COVID-19 virus end country with the COVID-19 virus end highest vaccination rate in the COVID-19 virus end world, is headed for 75 per cent coverage in just two months.The US will reach 75 per cent coverage mark by the COVID-19 virus end end of 2021. It shows that richer Western countries are rolling out vaccines more rapidly. However, in some of these countries such as Canada, the COVID-19 virus end vaccination drive has slowed down.If Canada inoculates its people at the COVID-19 virus end current lower rate, it might take more than 10 years to vaccinate 75 per cent of its population.One big reason for the COVID-19 virus end ‘slower’ vaccination process is the COVID-19 virus end constraints of the COVID-19 virus end manufacturing and supply of the COVID-19 virus end Covid-19 shots. In vaccine-manufacturing hubs of India and Mexico, the COVID-19 virus end manufacturing of vaccines is getting speedier.According to Bloomberg, contracts for 8.5 billion doses have already been signed. But the COVID-19 virus end downside of it is that only a third of the COVID-19 virus end countries have launched any kind of Covid-19 vaccination drive.The alternate way of getting rid of Covid-19 worldwide is herd immunity. If vaccine coverage is small, the COVID-19 virus end coronavirus can continue to spread in a community or country unchecked. The bigger size of vaccinated population functions like a community wall or collective in stopping the COVID-19 virus end virus from spreading and creating an outbreak-like situation. This is herd immunity. It can be achieved through both natural infection and vaccination drive.Currently, the COVID-19 virus end world population is about 7.7 billion. Since all the COVID-19 virus end vaccines rolled out in different countries are two-dose regime, the COVID-19 virus end world needs more than 15 billion doses for total vaccine coverage, and more than 10 billion doses for 75 per cent vaccine coverage — a threshold that most experts agree to have for attaining herd immunity.In a trial, Covid-19 vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson recently showed that a single dose provides sound protection against the COVID-19 virus end coronavirus. If that succeeds, it may help the COVID-19 virus end world to attain herd immunity and bring an end to Covid-19 earlier than anticipated.A vaccine that protects against symptoms of Covid-19 could contribute to the COVID-19 virus end spread of the COVID-19 virus end disease if—and this is still just an if—the COVID-19 virus end people who get vaccinated remain capable of carrying and transmitting the COVID-19 virus end virus. That’s a risk that’s gotten little attention amid the COVID-19 virus end deserved jubilation over a Nov. 9 report from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE that their vaccine candidate appears to be highly effective.It’s a matter of timing. If everyone in the COVID-19 virus end world is vaccinated, or has developed antibodies through exposure to the COVID-19 virus end disease, there will be no problem. But in the COVID-19 virus end early going, when only some people are protected, they could unwittingly spread the COVID-19 virus end disease to people who are still vulnerable. The vaccinated people might stop wearing masks and social distancing since they aren’t themselves at risk anymore. They could be carrying the COVID-19 virus end SARS-CoV-2 virus, even if they’re not getting sick from it.How big a problem this might be is hard to say, because we don't know for sure if immunized people are capable of shedding infectious virus. It's possible that their antibodies will eradicate any infection pretty quickly, so they might just shed viral debris. Pfizer and the COVID-19 virus end Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not immediately respond to requests for comment.It’s also not yet clear how much protection the COVID-19 virus end Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and others would provide. The gold standard is to achieve sterilizing immunity, which is so strong that the COVID-19 virus end virus can’t get a grip in the COVID-19 virus end body at all—meaning that vaccinated people are safe to others. The human papillomavirus vaccine provides sterilizing immunity, for example. But sterilizing immunity is hard to achieve with viruses such as SARS-CoV-2, which enter through the COVID-19 virus end respiratory system. The only sure way to know if the COVID-19 virus end vaccine provides sterilizing immunity would be to check whether trial subjects who remain free of Covid-19 have been exposed to it, by tracing their contacts.The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and others might provide just functional immunity—protecting people from the COVID-19 virus end full-blown disease but not from carrying the COVID-19 virus end virus. Functional immunity may also be what people get from being infected by the COVID-19 virus end disease itself. They can catch it again, but will have fewer, if any, symptoms. We already know that people who are asymptomatic can spread Covid-19. In fact, that’s one of its scariest characteristics.The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and others might provide just functional immunity—protecting people from the COVID-19 virus end full-blown disease but not from carrying the COVID-19 virus end virus. Functional immunity may also be what people get from being infected by the COVID-19 virus end disease itself. They can catch it again, but will have fewer, if any, symptoms. We already know that people who are asymptomatic can spread Covid-19. In fact, that’s one of its scariest characteristics.Bloomberg’s Jason Gale raised this issue with Paul Griffin, a professor in the COVID-19 virus end faculty of medicine at the COVID-19 virus end University of Queensland in Australia. Griffin, who is an investigator on four Covid-19 vaccines that do not include the COVID-19 virus end Pfizer-BioNTech one, said that while it might turn out that vaccinated people can transmit the COVID-19 virus end disease, transmission is far more likely if people are coughing and sneezing. “So if we are preventing clinical disease, then that will go a long way to reducing transmission as well, even if it's not precisely a transmission-blocking vaccine,” Griffin said on Nov. 10.In other words, under the COVID-19 virus end right conditions, a vaccine can and should suppress the COVID-19 virus end transmission of Covid-19. But if people who get vaccinated throw caution to the COVID-19 virus end winds, it’s possible they could get a lot of other people sick.The World Health Organization said Friday that a vaccine will be a “vital tool” in the COVID-19 virus end global fight against the COVID-19 virus end coronavirus, but it won’t end the COVID-19 virus end Covid-19 pandemic on its own and there’s no guarantee scientists will find one.World leaders and the COVID-19 virus end public must learn to manage the COVID-19 virus end virus and make permanent adjustments to their daily lives to bring the COVID-19 virus end virus down to low levels, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a news conference from the COVID-19 virus end agency’s Geneva headquarters. “At the COVID-19 virus end same time, we will not, we cannot go back to the COVID-19 virus end way things were.”Throughout history, outbreaks and pandemics have changed economies and societies, he said.“In particular, the COVID-19 virus end Covid-19 pandemic has given new impetus to the COVID-19 virus end need to accelerate efforts to respond to climate change,” he said. “The Covid-19 pandemic has given us a glimpse of our world as it could be: cleaner skies and rivers.”The virus has infected more than 22.7 million people worldwide and killed at least 794,100 in more than seven months, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. There are at least 30 potential vaccines currently in clinical trials, according to the COVID-19 virus end WHO, but there is no guarantee they will be safe and effective, he said.Even though human trials for potential vaccines are progressing, scientists say key questions remain. Covid-19 was discovered in December. While numerous research papers and studies have been produced on the COVID-19 virus end virus, scientists still don’t fully understand how it affects the COVID-19 virus end body or how well someone is protected from reinfection after recovering.Earlier this month, Tedros said there was no “silver bullet” to the COVID-19 virus end coronavirus and “there might never be.”A sero-survey by the COVID-19 virus end Health Department has found that around 21.5% of people residing in Puducherry region have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus end novel coronavirus till September end.The survey shows the COVID-19 virus end number of people infected has increased by only around 1.5% last month as sero-surveys by Jawaharlal Institute of Postgradudate Medical Education and Research showed a rise in percentage of those infected from 5% in July to 20.7% by end of August.“Our latest survey showed that around 21.5% of the COVID-19 virus end people residing in the COVID-19 virus end Union Territory got infected by COVID-19 by the COVID-19 virus end end of September. In other words, one in five persons in Puducherry district showed evidence of COVID-19 infection by the COVID-19 virus end end of September. It means the COVID-19 virus end spread of the COVID-19 virus end virus has been contained for the COVID-19 virus end time,” a senior Health Department official told The Hindu.The Department collected blood samples of 2,232 persons from across the COVID-19 virus end district for SARS-CoV-2 virus antibodies. Of the COVID-19 virus end total surveyed, 910 were men and 1,322 were women. A total of 482 persons were positive for the COVID-19 virus end antibodies, of which 311 were women and 171 men, said an internal note prepared by the COVID-19 virus end Department.Sharing the COVID-19 virus end findings of the COVID-19 virus end survey, the COVID-19 virus end official said unlike the COVID-19 virus end study by Jipmer, the COVID-19 virus end sero-survey by the COVID-19 virus end Department included persons below the COVID-19 virus end age group of 18 years. The positivity rate for antibodies among people up to 18 years was 24%, the COVID-19 virus end official said.The positivity in persons from 18 to 30 years was 17%, 31 to 45 years was 18%, 46 to 60 years was 24% and above 60 years was 30%. More women seemed to be infected than men. Extremes of ages were infected more and there was not much difference in the COVID-19 virus end spread of the COVID-19 virus end virus in urban and rural areas, the COVID-19 virus end note said.The Department was conducting a sero-survey in Karaikal, Yanam and Mahe regions. “It is an interim report and the COVID-19 virus end findings will be released once the COVID-19 virus end survey was completed in other regions,” said a senior official.Just over 100 years ago, a new strain of influenza infected a third of the COVID-19 virus end world's population — but within just three years, the COVID-19 virus end threat of this deadly flu had all but passed.This was a time before modern medical care and even before humans understood what viruses were. So what's changed since then?It's a question plenty of you have asked in recent months: how do pandemics end? And how will the COVID-19 virus end one we're currently living through end?Three ingredients for a pandemicAn infectious agent needs three conditions to cause a pandemic, says virologist Kirsty Short from the COVID-19 virus end University of Queensland:needs to cause disease in humansneeds to be highly transmissible3.We need to have no pre-existing immunity to it"For example, we live with MERS today," says Dr Short, referring to Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, a coronavirus that is related to the COVID-19 virus end one that causes COVID-19."It hasn't caused a pandemic yet because it's not highly transmissible from person to person."In contrast, the COVID-19 virus end seasonal coronaviruses that we get, probably at one point were a pandemic, and they've just become these seasonal colds that we don't really care about because we've evolved immunity to them."Stay up-to-date on the COVID-19 virus end coronavirus outbreakDownload the COVID-19 virus end ABC News app and subscribe to our range of news alerts for the COVID-19 virus end latest on how the COVID-19 virus end pandemic is impacting the COVID-19 virus end worldIn terms of the COVID-19 virus end three ingredients that make a pandemic, when it comes to COVID-19 there's not much we can do to stop the COVID-19 virus end coronavirus from infecting us, because that's based on the COVID-19 virus end biology of the COVID-19 virus end virus and us as humans.With physical distancing and masks, we are somewhat able to pull that second lever of not allowing the COVID-19 virus end virus to transmit as much.But the COVID-19 virus end big thing that stops a virus becoming a pandemic — that is, a large-scale outbreak affecting multiple countries or continents — is the COVID-19 virus end third factor: immunity."Herd immunity can be achieved through natural infection or vaccination," Dr Short says.Swine flu: From pandemic to seasonal fluWhen swine flu struck in April 2009, it was different enough from previous influenza virus strains to spread at a pandemic rate.Around 10 per cent of the COVID-19 virus end world's population caught the COVID-19 virus end virus. Then, about six months into the COVID-19 virus end pandemic, a vaccine was available.By the COVID-19 virus end following year, the COVID-19 virus end swine flu had become a seasonal flu virus — still circulating, but not at pandemic levels."You had a sufficient amount of the COVID-19 virus end population that either had immunity to it, because they'd had the COVID-19 virus end vaccine or had immunity to it because they had had the COVID-19 virus end virus," Dr Short says."That then meant that if they got infected, they were less likely to transmit, it was less likely to be severe."The virus didn't go away. But the COVID-19 virus end next year, in 2010, the COVID-19 virus end virus was still there, but there was enough pre-existing immunity to its 2009 ancestor that it wasn't a pandemic."A pandemic without a vaccineBut what about the COVID-19 virus end 1918 flu pandemic? It's the COVID-19 virus end big historical pandemic many have compared COVID-19 to, so how did it end in the COVID-19 virus end absence of a vaccine?The same ingredient changed, Dr Short says: herd immunity. But without a vaccine it took longer to do so than with the COVID-19 virus end 2009 swine flu pandemic."In 1918, there was no vaccine. The virus just went around unchecked. And the COVID-19 virus end pandemic continued in some places until 1921," she says."What happened then is that there was enough herd immunity or pre-existing immunity that it actually became the COVID-19 virus end seasonal flu strain."That 1918 virus remained the COVID-19 virus end seasonal flu strain until 1958, when it was replaced by an H2N2 strain, the COVID-19 virus end Asian flu pandemic."But achieving herd immunity in the COVID-19 virus end absence of a vaccine came at enormous cost: tens of millions of people died worldwide.For the COVID-19 virus end past century, the COVID-19 virus end 1918 flu pandemic was considered a worst-case scenario because it was both highly infectious and clinically severe, says medical historian Peter Hobbins from Artefact Heritage Services."Our pandemic planning for the COVID-19 virus end last century has very much relied on that scenario... [and] a lot of that pandemic planning has come into play this year," says Dr Hobbins, who also holds an honorary position at University of Sydney's department of history."It's been interesting to see that because of the COVID-19 virus end very nature of COVID, we've ultimately had to rely on measures that were very similar to those used in 1919."Despite all the COVID-19 virus end advances in our health care system, ambulances, intensive care units, antiviral drugs, supportive care, epidemiology, global surveillance systems, all of those developments we've seen in the COVID-19 virus end last hundred years, ultimately we've still had to fall back on the COVID-19 virus end sorts of measures that we saw were effective in 1918 and 19, including good nursing care for victims, quarantine, social isolation and basic measures like masks and sanitation."Sometimes what we know from the COVID-19 virus end past still turns out to be the COVID-19 virus end most effective response that we have."How and when will this pandemic end?The promise of a vaccine for COVID-19 is inching closer to reality, with some candidate vaccines already approaching the COVID-19 virus end last big hurdle in the COVID-19 virus end clinical trial process. There's also multiple treatments for the COVID-19 virus end disease being trialled and refined.But it's not like a switch will flip and the COVID-19 virus end pandemic will end the COVID-19 virus end moment a vaccine is available, Dr Short says."There's not going to come a day where we say, 'OK, on [this date], this will no longer be a problem'. It's going to be a continuum," Dr Short says."What we should eventually see is that once we get vaccines out, the COVID-19 virus end number of cases will go down. On top of that, therapies will improve and the COVID-19 virus end mortality rate will go down.'ll end with a fizzle instead of a bang."And even with the COVID-19 virus end best therapies and vaccines in the COVID-19 virus end world, this virus is almost certainly going to be with us forever, even after the COVID-19 virus end pandemic phase has passed."To eliminate a virus from the COVID-19 virus end human population is incredibly difficult. We've only ever done it with one human pathogen, and that's smallpox," Dr Short says."To do that, you need a global vaccination strategy. On top of that, you need a vaccine that provides essentially 100 per cent protection against the COVID-19 virus end virus and against any mutations the COVID-19 virus end virus might throw up. And no animal reservoir. That's a pretty tall order."While the COVID-19 virus end pandemic has been hugely disruptive, Dr Short says it's also been a reminder that, despite our technological and medical advancements, we're still vulnerable to disease and need to be on our guard."If I could go back in time and just cancel the COVID-19 virus end pandemic, I'm not sure I would," she says."I would cancel the COVID-19 virus end deaths. But I think this was really important for the COVID-19 virus end world to go through, because I think it's taught us a really valuable lesson that we are not invincible."If we can remember what we've learnt during this process, as a species, we're going to be better prepared for the COVID-19 virus end future."We may be approaching a saturation point in terms of coronavirus infections in some of the COVID-19 virus end worst-hit countries.Eventually, the COVID-19 virus end virus will run out of people to infect.But there are still many unknowns when it comes to this virus.More than one-third of the COVID-19 virus end world's population is now in lockdown as the COVID-19 virus end world battles the COVID-19 virus end COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.We spoke to Belgian virologist Guido Vanham, the COVID-19 virus end former head of virology at the COVID-19 virus end Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, and asked him: how will this pandemic end? And on which factors might that depend?How will this pandemic end?Guido Vanham (GV): It will probably never end, in the COVID-19 virus end sense that this virus is clearly here to stay unless we eradicate it. And the COVID-19 virus end only way to eradicate such a virus would be with a very effective vaccine that is delivered to every human being. We have done that with smallpox, but that's the COVID-19 virus end only example - and that has taken many years.So it will most probably stay. It belongs to a family of viruses that we know - the COVID-19 virus end coronaviruses - and one of the COVID-19 virus end questions now is whether it will behave like those other viruses.It may reappear seasonally - more in the COVID-19 virus end winter, spring and autumn and less in the COVID-19 virus end early summer. So we will see whether that will have an impact.But at some point in this epidemic - and certainly in the COVID-19 virus end countries that are most affected, like Italy and Spain - there will be saturation, because according to predictions, up to 40% percent of the COVID-19 virus end Spanish and 26% of the COVID-19 virus end Italian population are or have been infected already. And, of course, when you go over 50% or so, even without doing anything else, the COVID-19 virus end virus just has fewer people to infect - and so the COVID-19 virus end epidemic will come down naturally. And that's what happened in in all the COVID-19 virus end previous epidemics when we didn't have any [treatments]. The rate of infection and the COVID-19 virus end number of those susceptible will determine when that happens.What are some of the COVID-19 virus end factors at play? What do we know, and what don't we know?GV: The first thing we know, of course, is that it's a very infectious virus - that's probably something that every inhabitant of the COVID-19 virus end world knows. But what is not known is the COVID-19 virus end infectious dose - how many viruses you need to produce an infection - and that will be very difficult to know unless we perform experimental infections.And we know people develop antibodies. That has been clearly shown in China, but we are not yet sure how protective these antibodies are. There is no convincing evidence yet that people who have recovered get ill again after a few days or weeks - so most probably, the COVID-19 virus end antibodies are at least partially protective. But how long will that protection last for - is it a matter of months or years? The epidemiology in the COVID-19 virus end future will depend on that - on the COVID-19 virus end level of protective immunity that you get at the COVID-19 virus end population level after this wave of infections, which we cannot really stop. We can mitigate it, we can flatten the COVID-19 virus end curve, but we cannot really stop it because at some point we will have to come out of our houses again and go to work and school. Nobody really knows when that will be.The virus will take its course and there will be a certain level of immunity - but the COVID-19 virus end answer to how long that will last will determine the COVID-19 virus end periodicity and the COVID-19 virus end amplitude of the COVID-19 virus end epidemics to come. Unless, of course, we find a way to block it in a year or so from now with an effective vaccine.There is also an unresolved question about what determines an individual's susceptibility to this disease. Of course there is age, but that’s not so surprising. People’s immune systems weaken with age. But then there is this concept of co-morbidities, which means that some people, even younger people, get ill because they have other diseases.It's logical that when you have cancer or diabetes, that you are more susceptible to infections. But what is remarkable - what we do not really understand - is that people with simple hypertension are also very vulnerable to developing this disease. So that's one of the COVID-19 virus end unresolved questions.And it will be interesting to see what the COVID-19 virus end profile is of people who are infected but do not get ill. We will know in a few months - that question is already being addressed in China. Then you can go back and test for antibodies, because it looks as though everyone who has gone through the COVID-19 virus end infection will develop antibodies - and that those will remain for a while.There are people that have antibodies and have not presented to to the COVID-19 virus end medical services and claim that they have been healthy all the COVID-19 virus end time. What's the COVID-19 virus end genetic profile of those people as compared with the COVID-19 virus end people who went to the COVID-19 virus end medical wards? That is an interesting question. One hint has already been discovered in China; your blood group could be important. It’s very preliminary data, but in a year or so from now we will have a lot of data on that as well.Vaccine developers have been racing against time to find a shot that offers immunity against the COVID-19 virus end coronavirus disease (Covid-19). The University of Oxford announced on Monday that its vaccine against the COVID-19 virus end viral disease was up to 90% effective in preventing infection, Pfizer Inc. filed for emergency use authorization in the COVID-19 virus end US for its vaccine that showed 995% efficacy last Friday, Moderna said its vaccine was 94.5% effective, even as Hyderabad-based Dr Reddy’s Laboratories got ready to begin late stage trails of Russia’s Sputnik V in India this week. Parallelly, major treatment protocols are being revised following results from several global trials that cleared the COVID-19 virus end air on which Covid-19 therapies work better than others.Most Covid-19 treatments fall under three broad categories, antivirals that prevent the COVID-19 virus end virus from multiplying, immune-modulators that regulate the COVID-19 virus end immune response, and combinations that use multiple mechanisms of action.Antiviral remdesivirThe antiviral remdesivir was suspended from the COVID-19 virus end World Health Organization prequalification list that developing countries use as a benchmark for procurement. The suspension followed the COVID-19 virus end health agency’s guidance on Friday against the COVID-19 virus end use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, regardless of disease severity, after an international guidelines development group found no evidence that the COVID-19 virus end drug improves survival rates, reduces the COVID-19 virus end need for mechanical ventilation, or boosts recovery and other patient outcomes. The group, however, recognized that more research was needed, and supported continued enrolment in trials evaluating remdesivir.“The guidelines group of WHO is separate from Solidarity Trial group as it reviews all evidence, including the COVID-19 virus end WHO trial. They have concluded that there is no evidence of benefit from (remdesivir) in any group of hospitalised patients and that available evidence is inadequate if there is a benefit in non-hospitalised patients. As such, corticosteroids are the COVID-19 virus end only class of drugs with demonstrated benefit on reducing deaths in hospitalised patients. The search for other effective modalities of treatment goes on,” said Dr K Srinath Reddy, president, Public Health Foundation of India.Aspirin and other anti-coagulantsOn the COVID-19 virus end upside, the COVID-19 virus end ubiquitous painkiller and blood-thinning drug aspirin was added to the COVID-19 virus end UK’s Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) trial in early November. “Clotting is a big problem [in Covid-19]. Aspirin is a widely available, cheap drug which, if it were to work, would be a huge boost,” Peter Horby, the COVID-19 virus end chair of the COVID-19 virus end RECOVERY trial and professor of emerging infectious diseases and global health at the COVID-19 virus end University of Oxford, told joint inquiry committees from the COVID-19 virus end House of Commons in the COVID-19 virus end UK.“We’re [also] seeing better use of anticoagulants — heparin and others — to prevent clotting, and one would anticipate that the COVID-19 virus end introduction of dexamethasone has also had an impact. That would be something that would reduce fatality rates,” said Horby.Monoclonal antibodiesThe US Food and Drug Administration this month issued an emergency use authorisation for the COVID-19 virus end investigational monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab for the COVID-19 virus end treatment of mild-to-moderate Covid-19 in adult and paediatric patients who are 12 years of age and older weighing at least 40 kg who are at high risk for progressing to severe disease and/or hospitalization. Bamlanivimab is not authorized for patients who are hospitalized or need oxygen therapy as it may worsen clinical outcomes.Monoclonal antibodies are laboratory-made proteins that mimic the COVID-19 virus end immune system’s ability to fight harmful antigens, such as viruses and bacteria. Bamlanivimab is directed against the COVID-19 virus end spike protein of Sars-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus end virus that causes COvid-19, and works by stopping the COVID-19 virus end virus from entering human cells.The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ ACTIV-5 Big Effect Trial also began trials of the COVID-19 virus end monoclonal antibodies risankizumab and lenzilumab last month to determine whether they helped hospitalized patients recover faster.Some trials fell short. In October, Eli Lilly and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals suspended their trials of monoclonal antibodies in hospitalised patients on the COVID-19 virus end grounds of lack of efficacy and potential safety concerns.Monoclonal antibodies are approved for Covid-19 treatment in India. “Monoclonal antibodies have some role in early disease, but not in patients who are on oxygen or ventilator support. Since they have a limited role in mild disease, and we know a large number of patients recover on their own, they may not really benefit that much,” said Dr Randeep Guleria, director, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Delhi at HT Leadership Summit on Thursday. “We also have to consider whether we will have enough doses to offer everyone, whether the COVID-19 virus end cost can be met as they are expsnsive, and whether they will be needed once the COVID-19 virus end vaccines come,” said Guleria.Anti-parasitic ivermectinStudies have shown that the COVID-19 virus end affordable and widely available drug ivermectin used to treat parasitic infections has antiviral action against the COVID-19 virus end Sars-CoV-2. The use of ivermectin in doses ranging from 200 to 1200 mcg/kg body weight, for a duration of three to seven days, is showing promise in symptomatic relief and viral load reduction.Two studies of ivermectin alone or in combination with doxycycline, found ivermectin-doxycycline combination therapy had a better success of symptomatic relief, shortened recovery duration, reduced adverse effects, and superior patient compliance compared to the COVID-19 virus end hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin combination in mild to moderate cases of Covid-19 disease. A retrospective study of 280 patients treated with ivermectin against standard of care found fewer deaths in the COVID-19 virus end ivermectin group.Anti-parasitic ivermectinStudies have shown that the COVID-19 virus end affordable and widely available drug ivermectin used to treat parasitic infections has antiviral action against the COVID-19 virus end Sars-CoV-2. The use of ivermectin in doses ranging from 200 to 1200 mcg/kg body weight, for a duration of three to seven days, is showing promise in symptomatic relief and viral load reduction.Two studies of ivermectin alone or in combination with doxycycline, found ivermectin-doxycycline combination therapy had a better success of symptomatic relief, shortened recovery duration, reduced adverse effects, and superior patient compliance compared to the COVID-19 virus end hydroxychloroquine-azithromycin combination in mild to moderate cases of Covid-19 disease. A retrospective study of 280 patients treated with ivermectin against standard of care found fewer deaths in the COVID-19 virus end ivermectin group.