Doctors across the world are offering preliminary but encouraging reports that the coronavirus may be losing steam and becoming less deadly: a behavior observed in at least one respiratory pandemic before, and a welcome sign for a world weary of nonstop COVID-19 fears.
Optimism over the coronavirus has been in short supply since January, when public health officials and politicians began publicly and repeatedly speculating that COVID-19 may be a semi-permanent fixture of global life for the foreseeable future, possibly for years.
The phrase “the new normal” has become an omnipresent part of American life, with medical experts such as Dr. Anthony Fauci speculating that Americans may never shake each other’s hands again, and some officials imagining that “social distancing” may persist into 2022 if not beyond.
But numerous prominent doctors and scientists in the last few weeks and months have begun to question that narrative, pointing to evidence that suggests the coronavirus may, unexpectedly, be dying out on its own.
Virus appears to behave the same regardless of lockdown measures
Yitzhak Ben Israel, a professor at Tel Aviv University, offered early speculation to that effect when in April he said, based on the observed behavior of the virus across the globe, that the virus appears to function more or less the same no matter what a country does to mitigate it. He said the virus appears to follow a fixed pattern in which there is “a decline in the number of infections even [in countries] without closures” that is “similar to the countries with closures.”
Those observations may indicate that the virus is not an unstoppable juggernaut: If it works more or less the same with or without mitigation efforts, then it is likely less of a danger than was initially imagined, insofar as the disease is less hampered by lockdowns than experts thought but also less deadly without them than was initially feared.
Yet apart from the epidemiological path the pandemic might or might not take, there are also signs that the virus itself is weakening, growing less potent, more diffuse and less deadly, meaning that even if a region experiences a significant amount of infections, it may amount to fewer hospitalizations and deaths than medical experts have predicted over the past few months.
That’s the contention of two top Italian doctors, who argued this week that the disease appears to be rapidly declining in potency. The coronavirus “clinically no longer exists in Italy,” San Raffaele Hospital Director Alberto Zangrillo told Reuters, claiming that recent swabs of infected patients have shown “a viral load in quantitative terms that was absolutely infinitesimal compared to the ones carried out a month or two months ago.”
Matteo Bassetti, meanwhile—the head of the infectious diseases clinic at the San Martino hospital in Genoa—said that “the strength the virus had two months ago is not the same strength it has today” and that “it is clear that today the COVID-19 disease is different.”
The Italian government is still cautioning its citizens to continue to treat the virus as highly dangerous.
Yet those remarks from two high-ranking Italian physicians are notable: Italy was for a time the hardest-hit country in the world, and remains in unadjusted rankings the country with the fourth-most reported coronavirus deaths worldwide. Images of Italy’s brutally crumbling healthcare system—with patients dying on gurneys in hallways, doctors collapsing after working days without sleep, and hospitals having to figure out to whom they should administer care and whom they should allow to die—galvanized much of the rest of the world into shutting down their countries for months.
Indeed, “the next Italy” became a running phrase throughout much of March, as leaders feared their countries could be overrun by the virus in a similar fashion. If the onetime global epicenter of COVID-19 is seeing a virus that’s “declining in potency,” that could very well mean the disease is doomed to weaken, and perhaps eventually disappear.
Credit: news.phxfeeds.com
