"This should not be treated
as a political crisis but as a health crisis, if you treat it as a political
crisis it's all about managing your reputation, if you treat it as a health
crisis it's about saving lives."
No one can deny that the fear on everyone’s minds can be expressed in two words: second wave of coronavirus.
At first we have to know that second wave is not a scientific term with well-defined parameters. Rather, it’s used to refer to a subsequent, serious increase in cases that occurs after the original surge has been quashed in a given area. Pandemics are caused by new pathogens that the vast majority of humans have no immune protection against. That’s what allows them to become global outbreaks.
Pandemics are uncommon, but influenza is one of the more frequent causes. What often happens is that a novel variant of flu virus spreads around the world and then recedes, kind of like a tsunami. A few months later, it comes back and spreads around the world, or large parts of it, again.
Professor Pennington is emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. has said there is no evidence to suggest a coronavirus second wave is coming.
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The virus may also have infected a huge portion of people in most areas, giving them immunity from re-infection and possibly creating so-called herd immunity, which protects those who haven’t been infected by curtailing the virus’s circulation.
There have been no flu-like second
waves (or even peaks) in China, South Korea or New Zealand. There was no second
wave with SARS, another coronavirus.
Lockdown has only stopped big
outbreaks, it has not stopped the virus getting into care homes, which is a
real scandal. We are going in the right direction with getting the number of
cases down but it is too slow.
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Why wasn’t there a second wave of SARS?
The 2002-2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome in Asia never reached the scope of a pandemic. Though caused by a coronavirus, it wasn’t as contagious as the one responsible for Covid-19. Its spread was mainly restricted to hospitals and other settings where people came in close contact with the body fluids of infected patients. Ebola is another pathogen relatively new to humans.
There
have been periodic outbreaks in Africa, but while the virus is
highly contagious in some settings, it hasn’t been sufficiently infectious to
spread around the world like the coronavirus.
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The good news is that it is very likely there is an immunity. This is suggested by the proximity to other viruses, epidemiological data and animal experiments.
Researchers infected four rhesus monkeys, a species close to humans, with SARS-CoV-2. The monkeys showed symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, developed neutralizing antibodies and recovered after a few days. When the recovered animals were reinfected with the virus, they no longer developed any symptoms: They were immune.
