When and How Will the COVID-19 Pandemic End?

We are already a year and a half into this pandemic and this new virus has infected over 200 million people and claimed over 4 million lives over this period. We all want this pandemic to end as soon as possible in order to continue our normal life, but it appears that this will never be over as the cases and deaths continue to rise over time.

One possible way the pandemic could end is that the virus kills every single human on Earth. You might believe that this is relatively likely if you are a fan of Plague Inc., but it is actually extremely unlikely, even though the COVID-19 coronavirus has the ability to reinfect people. If you still do not believe it, let's do some math:

The COVID-19 coronavirus's death rate (IFR) is 13 out of 1000 (i.e. 1.3%), which means that a person has a 98.7% chance to survive if he/she gets infected once. The virus can reinfect people, so if the same person gets the virus twice, the chance that he/she still survives is 98.7% * 98.7%, which is about 97.4%. Similarly, if the same person gets infected a third time, their survival rate will be about 96.2%. The formula that maps the number of times a person has been infected to their survival rate is R=0.987ⁿ, where R is the survival rate and n is the number of times infected with the virus. The following table shows this relationship in numbers:

This means that if every single person on Earth gets infected 100 times, 27% (about 2 billion) will still survive. Thus, it is extremely unlikely that the COVID-19 coronavirus will end humanity.

A popular belief is that COVID-19 will gradually change to a flu-like disease as the virus weakens over time. This belief is fairly plausible because the same thing happened to the Spanish flu, which is another pandemic that broke out around 1918.

With the passage of time, the death rate of a pandemic lowers, and after a very long time (I am talking a few decades), the disease will no longer be remotely severe and humans will get to continue their normal life.

It has been found that a person having been infected with SARS and recovered from it has a significant amount of COVID-19 antibody and is therefore not vulnerable to infection. If this is the case, then the COVID-19 coronavirus will appear to have been eradicated for a few years, but then all of a sudden a resurgence will take place - at least we will get to enjoy normal life for quite some time before having to enter lockdown again!

At first glance the answer to this question should be "yes", but seven months later, the rollout of COVID vaccines appears to be mostly useless in ending the COVID-19 pandemic: from January 2021 to approximately the beginning of March, the daily new cases saw a continuous decrease, but following that a significant increase took place again. By the beginning of May, the daily cases started dropping, and by the end of June another surge in cases commenced, which brings us to now.

However, at this point we cannot draw any conclusions about whether COVID vaccines will help because it has not been long enough since they came into existence.

If your question is whether the COVID-19 pandemic will end, the answer is "yes". The real question is just when and how it will end, which we will have to wait and see. If you feel sad about the current situation, simply remember that this pandemic will not last forever and you, your family members, and all your friends will eventually get through it. Finally, thanks for reading and stay safe.