How Pandemics End? How Will Covid-19 End?

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Gina Kolata

A Sicilian fresco from 1445. In the previous century, the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe’s population. Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how? According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes. “When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins. In other words, an end can occur not because a disease has been vanquished but because people grow tired of panic mode and learn to live with a disease. The challenge, Dr. Brandt said, is that there will be no sudden victory. Trying to define the end of the epidemic “will be a long and difficult process.”[More]