The Interview Editors
A World Health Organisation (WHO) expert, Dr. Bruce Aylward, has said that the question of whether COVID-19 will disappear completely in the future is highly dependent on what countries and societies do.
Aylward, who is the senior adviser to WHO’s director-general and one of the world’s top officials in charge of fighting the coronavirus pandemic, made this known in an interview with Time.com.
When asked if COVID-19 would ever disappear in the future, Aylward said if every case was tested and isolated, it \was possible to keep the curtail the spread of the virus but that relying on shut down measures without finding out every case might not be a total solution to the pandemic.
Aylward said, “What it looks like is that we’re going to have a substantial wave of this disease right through basically the globe unless something very different happens in the southern hemisphere.
“And the question then is: What’s going to happen? Is this going to disappear completely? Are we going to get into a period of cyclical waves? Or are we going to end up with low level endemic disease that we have to deal with?
“A lot of that is going to depend on what we as countries, as societies, do. If we do the testing of every single case, rapid isolation of the cases, you should be able to keep cases down low.
“If you simply rely on the big shut down measures without finding every case, then every time you take the brakes off, it could come back in waves. So that future frankly, may be determined by us and our response as much as the virus.*
