Will it be possible to eradicate COVID-19?

Is there a goal that might seem more desirable right now than eradicating COVID-19?

Scientists working hard, exhausted toilets, burned politicians, bankrupt businessmen, unemployed workers … and vaccines arriving by dropper. This is the tremendous panorama with which the newscasts, in a dystopian interpretation of Groundhog Day from Trapped in Time, crush us day after day in a psychologically devastating loop.

An example for optimism

We are going to try to escape from this apocalyptic pessimism to look to the future with positive perspectives. Humanity has overcome terrible things before, and I am not speaking figuratively. Take, for example, smallpox. Until, as someone say, yesterday, smallpox constituted a health threat to humanity of the first kind. With brutal periodic outbreaks, it had plagued our species since ancient times. In fact, traces of its ravages have been detected in the mummy of Pharaoh Ramses V and its effects are recorded in civilizations as distant as 4th century China or 7th century India.

This contagious disease, which had the aggravation of presenting its highest mortality rate in infants and children under five years of age, left survivors with tremendous sequelae, including blindness, encephalitis or osteomyelitis. As if that were not enough, his signature, in the form of deep scars, accompanied you on your skin for life.

But it was overdue. The development of effective vaccines made it possible that, after a last case was registered in Somalia in 1977, the World Health Assembly, the highest decision-making body of the WHO, approved the declaration of its eradication in 1980.

It’s over. The terrible Variola virus had been eradicated from the planet. Science, the coordination of international organizations and the trust in the work of many people had won the game.

Can we achieve such a success with SARS-CoV-2?

Can we achieve such a success with SARS-CoV-2? If we make a comparative analysis of these two infectious diseases –especially with regard to their epidemiological characteristics– we find very significant differences:

1. Smallpox was very visible . The pustules and eruptions that it produced on the skin affected its entire surface, including the face and hands. That is, the virus carrier was easily detectable, without the need for PCR or antigen testing. He sang from afar, come on. When you saw someone like that, regardless of your academic background, your country of origin or your age, no one forced you to maintain a safe distance. You alone knew, intuitively, that the best thing was to put air in between.
2. The time between infection and the first symptoms was very short . That meant the disease couldn’t spread too far without being noticed. That asymptomatic phase, where you act like a virus sprinkler left and right without being aware of it, was very small.
3. The Variola virus only affected humans. Other than in an individual Homo sapiens, smallpox had nowhere to hide. There were no reservoirs of these viruses in any other animal species. On the contrary, our hated coronavirus does not discriminate taxonomically. From what we know so far, it doesn’t matter whether it’s bats, pangolins, minks, or people. Unfortunately for us, he must “think” that what doesn’t kill makes you fat.
4. Smallpox survivors and those vaccinated showed full and lifelong immunity against the virus. That meant that health workers were able to carry out their work all over the planet, safely, and more effectively, by not being subject to cumbersome biological protection measures. We cannot say the same about the new coronavirus, since we still do not know for how long our vaccines will protect us or if doctors and nurses will be able to get rid of working with PPE.
5. Finally, smallpox was an old acquaintance of science , while SARS-CoV-2, as they say, has just arrived in our laboratories and with the aggravation that it does not stop mutating and generating new strains.

Still, is there cause for optimism?

Of course yes.

Let’s analyze another series of differences between the two scenarios of the virological fight, this time in our favor:

The advance, in these 50 years, of Molecular Biology, Genetics or Virology (to name some of the biological disciplines directly involved in research against SARS-CoV-2) has been spectacular. What is known today is not only orders of magnitude higher than what was known in the 1970s, it was not even conceived.

To give a few examples, it was not until 1977 that the complete genome of an organism was sequenced for the first time (the bacteriophage Phi X 174, by the double Nobel laureate Frederick Sanger) and it was not until 1987 that a virus was identified using molecular cloning techniques. These spectacular advances, which initially sounded like science fiction, are now routine techniques in most biological research laboratories.

There is internet. This marvel of a tool for all human activities has been a boon to science. Being able to have, in real time, all the knowledge that is being generated in the different disciplines of a certain area of knowledge, represents a quantum leap for scientific research. Working in a network has made it possible to achieve the utopia of interconnectivity between different specialties, levels of biological complexity, work groups, universities, research institutes and hospitals in all countries. In other words, the rate of global advancement of scientific knowledge that the world exhibits today was inconceivable decades ago.

We will overcome this pandemic and, as if it were a broken heartbreak, SARS-CoV-2 will end up being one of many.

A. Victoria de Andrés Fernández, Associate Professor in the Department of Animal Biology, University of Malaga

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.