How long will COVID-19 last? Early 2022 is the consensus
By Michael Moran
Lost amid the epidemiological uncertainty and political spin surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic is a vital question: How long will global economies and society-at-large be wrestling with the virus?
For everyone from national leaders to university presidents, healthcare and transit workers to corporate CEOs and real estate facilities managers, getting a bead on the duration of the current crisis is a prerequisite to developing strategies and making the investments required to survive, mitigate and finally defeat the pandemic.
Answering this question as clearly as possible is no less important to us at Microshare. As Chief Risk & Sustainability Officer here, I hope this brief overview of our thinking is helpful. And at the risk of oversimplifying, the scientific consensus seems to be that COVID-19 will be aggressively spreading through most of 2021 and in some scenarios for longer, with all the attendant implications for those who work in, run, own and manage buildings and large facilities.
The announcement November 9 from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech of progress toward a vaccine is excellent news. But experts warn that even a potent vaccine will face headwinds, including questions about the extent and duration of immunity conferred, public skepticism about safety and huge distribution challenges.
Uncertain dynamics, uncertain motives
Like virtually everything related to COVID-19, the question of duration is freighted with political motive, wishful thinking and underlying conspiracy theories. A good benchmark for separating spin from sense in this regard is to consider motive: sadly, a health official whose job depends on the next election or a real estate executive concerned about portfolio valuation may leaven the bad news with unwarranted optimism. Similarly, pandemic crusaders and vocal critics of the way the virus has been handled to date by governments of Left, Right and Center often ply their own agenda. Too often these voices sound an unhelpful note of doom, reveling in tragic infection and death rates that bolster their case but forgetting to acknowledge that those contentious data points involved human lives sickened and sometimes lost.
Judging the duration of COVID-19 also requires defining what it is we’re measuring. COVID-19, in the public consciousness, emerged around the 2020 New Year as an outbreak in far off central China, and it presumably will vacate its place at the top of global news headlines at some point in the next year or two as deaths, cases and infection rates diminish.
Yet the virus itself may well have been around for years before the bulk of the world noticed; some theorize, pointing to very low infection rates in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, where cases per million stand in the low double digits. Some experts believe COVID-19 was extant in that region for years and thus the local population build herd immunity before the outbreak in the central Chinese city of Wuhan put it on the global radar.[i] The truth is we have no idea when the virus first emerged.
“I think that mask wearing and some degree of social distancing and contact tracing is something we will be living with — hopefully living with happily — for several years.”
– Eric Toner, Senior Scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security
It’s equally important to stress that COVID-19, no matter what kind of vaccine is developed or protocols adopted, probably will never go away. Think influenza, which returns in slightly different form every autumn and is subjected to tweaked vaccines that are wildly unreliable in terms of effectiveness. Similarly, previous efforts to vanquish diseases like measles, tuberculosis and others show, vanquishing a disease or virus runs into serious challenges even in the best case scenarios, including mutations, shifting climate, global trade and transportation patters and unpredictable human behaviors.[ii]
End of the Tunnel: When will we see the light?
The question of COVID-19 duration is enormously important to Microshare and our global client base. When the virus first emerged in early 2020, we worked with several large clients, notably pharmaceuticals Glaxo Smith-Kline, to deploy a modified version of our pre-existing Asset Zoning solution as a wearable contact tracing solution in its global manufacturing sites. The solution, Universal Contact Tracing, has since been deployed on every continent. The power of the solution – it provides not only reliable data on contact events between humans, but also behavioral data that helps GSK and other clients design protocols to minimize exposure – is particularly powerful in indoor environments where social distancing and mask simply are not enough.
“We were very careful to deal head one with the privacy issues, an approach we called ‘Privacy by Design,” says Budaja Lim, GSK’s regional CIO for Southeast Asia. “We showed them the dashboards, stressed it was experimental and that it would not only protect them and the company, but also their families.” The wearable solution, he said, is regarded as “not just good, but fantastic.”
But how long with GSK and others need to deploy it? To answer this question, Microshare has drawn on research and interviews with some of the world’s leading experts in epidemiology, global health policy and wellness. While important uncertainties remain and almost every conversation is studded with caveats, particularly around potential vaccines and their effectiveness, all the leading authorities we consulted believe that the virus will remain a serious issue for economies, businesses and societies throughout 2021, with some positing that less than ideal vaccine performance and distribution could extend that into 2022 and beyond.
The experts speak
Here is a summary of some of our findings on key questions:
HOW LONG WILL COVID EMERGENCY MEASURES LAST?
“I think that mask wearing and some degree of social distancing and contact tracing is something we will be living with — hopefully living with happily — for several years.” Eric Toner, Senior Scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security [iii]
“If you’re talking about getting back to a degree of normality which resembles where we were prior to COVID, it’s going to be well into 2021, maybe even towards the end of 2021.” Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases[iv]
HOW LONG WILL IMMUNITY TO THE VIRUS CONFERRED BY A VACCINE OR BY SURVIVING IT LAST?
“How long will immunity last? We don’t know. We’re just going to have to wait.” Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota[v]
“If we don’t get reasonably long duration of protection to natural infection, then we probably will not get that from a vaccine. Most of our vaccines do not do better than natural infection in terms of protection.” Dr Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Michigan school of public health.
“The new data show that immunity to other coronaviruses tends to be short-lived, with reinfections happening quite often about 12 months later and, in some cases, even sooner.” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)[vi]
“Unfortunately, the questions of duration and immunity do take time to uncover.” Philip Dormitzer, Viral Vaccine R&D chief for Pfizer, Inc.[vii]
ON HERD IMMUNITY
“Immunity in 2020 is no closer to being just around the corner than prosperity was in 1930.” Thomas R. Frieden, Former Director, CDC, noting current US infection rate is 7 percent; herd immunity requires upwards of 70 percent[viii]
Michael Moran is Microshare’s Chief Risk & Sustainability Officer, a former partner at the global advisory Control Risks and author of books on risk and geostrategy.
Footnotes:
[i] Vietnam escape from COVID may be down to natural immunity, The Telegraph, Aug. 1 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/01/vietnam-miracle-escape-covid-may-natural-immunity/
[ii] Emerging and reemerging viral respiratory infections up to COVID-19, National Institutes of Health, April 2020 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7195975/
[iii] “We’ll be living with masks for years,” CNET, July 6, 2020 https://www.cnet.com/news/living-with-masks-for-years-covid-19-through-the-eyes-of-a-pandemic-expert/
[iv] Interview with CNN, Sept 11, 2020,
[v] Nature, Aug. 5, 2020, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02278-5
[vi] Nature, Study released in Sept. 2020 edition https://www.livescience.com/seasonal-coronavirus-immunity-reinfection.html
[vii] How Long Will Protection Last? Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2020 https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-big-unknown-in-covid-19-vaccine-development-how-long-will-protection-last-11595755802
[viii] Claims of Herd Immunity Called “Nonsense,” The New York Times, Sept. 29, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/todayspaper/quotation-of-the-day-claims-of-herd-immunity-called-nonsense-as-well-as-dangerous.html