The fact is that no matter what happens a workable vaccine is not going to eradicate COVID from the world it will merely be another weapon in the battle against the disease. What is more important is we don’t become complacent about the disease. As individuals it will still be extremely important to wear a mask, social distance and maintain proper hygiene.
Our leaders will also have a big part to play. Not only will they need to get society moving again it is still really important to that they keep working on other methods to control the disease. They need to make sure that international travellers are not spreading the virus into or out of the country, public areas are cleaned and maintained to a COVID safe level, all public servants (especially health and aged care workers) are afforded every opportunity to work in the safest possible environment, testing and contact tracing is maintained to the highest standards and other medical research opportunities are explored.
I’ll even give you a couple of research avenues that should be explored. First, a treatment that is given to people suffering from COVID to ease their symptoms which would also hopefully decrease the mortality rate. There is anecdotal evidence to show that inhaled corticosteroids reduce the severity of symptoms of COVID-19. These drugs are widely available for treatment of a wide variety of diseases including emphysema and asthma. This is being explored overseas:
We need to explore it here in Australia. I just want to add that so far the evidence is anecdotal based on observations of people who should be badly effected by COVID skirting through the disease relatively unscathed and the most obvious reason is corticosteroids. It does not prove the correlation and proper studies need to be conducted in order to find out if it is ae effective treatment or not.
The second piece of research is something I have touched on before and that is the development of a one hour COVID-19 test and guess what, this is something that we can rush as there is no safety concerns as the test requires nothing more than spitting in a cup and the research is being developed right here in Australia at the Hunter Medical Research Institute. Can you imagine how much more effective our contact tracers would be if we could actively start contact tracing in positive cases after an hour as opposed to the 5 days some people have had to wait?
Don’t get me wrong, a vaccine will be a powerful tool in the arsenal of weapons against COVID but it is just one battle that will be won in a long and protracted war. It is extremely unlikely that a vaccine will eliminate the disease from a country or region completely, let alone have global eradication. Even with highly effective vaccines, eradication of any disease has been extremely difficult. In fact, in human diseases we have only managed it once. Smallpox, and it took almost 200 years from the development of the first vaccine in 1796. Polio is also on the chopping block but a yearly low of 22 wild cases in 2017 to an increase of 125 cases in 2019 shows that the disease is infuriatingly stubborn. We can expect nothing less from COVID-19.
Until next time,
Stay well :)
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