Right now, two and a half years into the pandemic, there are still many questions without answers. How will we navigate a world with so much Covid spreading, if this is something like our steady state? What will multiple infections do to our bodies, our organs, our lives? And if this isn’t the future we want, what do we need to do to stop it? “That’s, of course, the question that everybody’s asking right now,” said Daniela Weiskopf, a research assistant professor at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology.
Adapting to constant Covid risk won’t be easy. “We have a strategy for flu,” Karan said, noting that influenza is more seasonal and less transmissible. Updated vaccines for the flu roll out right before it’s expected to rise each winter, helping to suppress severe illness and death. But with Covid, there’s no such strategy. “With Covid, we’re seeing something different, which is very fast mutations, large resurgences with new variants.”
And it’s not just its relative lack of seasonality that sets Covid apart—it also damages organs in ways we usually don’t see with respiratory viruses. There’s evidence that Covid affects the heart, lungs, brain, liver, and kidneys, possibly for years or even a lifetime. “We don’t know what the long-term effects are,” Karan said. And it is unclear now what repeat infection will do to our bodies. The recent shift to focusing on hospitalizations and deaths instead of cases could do a major disservice to those whose mild cases have long-term consequences, he said. “Given that we don’t know that, our policymakers and public health leaders should not be discounting the importance of cases.”