A one-time lockdown won’t halt the novel coronavirus and repeated periods of social distancing may be required into 2022 to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed, Harvard scientists who modeled the pandemic’s trajectory said.
“We found that one-time social distancing measures are likely to be insufficient to maintain the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 within the limits of critical care capacity in the United States,” lead author Stephen Kissler said in a call with reporters.
Widespread viral testing would be required in order to determine when the thresholds to re-trigger distancing are crossed, said the authors. “By permitting periods of transmission that reach higher prevalence than otherwise would be possible, they allow an accelerated acquisition of herd immunity,” said co-author Marc Lipsitch.
The authors acknowledged a major drawback in their model is how little we currently know about how strong a previously infected person’s immunity is and how long it lasts.At present the best guesses based on closely-related coronaviruses are that it will confer some immunity, for up to about a year. There might also be some cross-protective immunity against COVID-19 if a person is infected by a common cold-causing betacoronavirus.
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