Coexisting with the Coronavirus COVID-19 is likely to become an endemic disease. How will our immune systems resist it?

[andhra_jp]

After getting the virus, the vaccine, or both, at least a hundred and sixty million Americans have acquired some form of immunity. 
Still, it is likely that the virus itself is here to stay. 

“I personally think that there’s essentially zero chance that sars-CoV-2 will be eradicated,” Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

Most viruses, including the four seasonal coronaviruses, other common-cold viruses, and the flu, haven’t been eradicated; scientists describe them as “endemic,” a term derived from the Greek word éndēmos, meaning “in the people.” 
Endemic viruses circulate constantly, typically at low levels, but with occasional, more severe outbreaks. 
We don’t shut out these endemic viruses with quarantines and stay-at-home orders; we live with them.

An important unanswered question about sars-CoV-2, therefore, is how long our antibody responses will last. 
“Long term, do your antibodies go to a stable plateau that persists for the rest of your life, or is it a downward-sloping line?” Bloom asked. 
For sars-CoV-2, specifically, it’s too early to know. 
But long-term studies of its relatives, the viruses that cause sars and mers, have found that antibody levels can decline detectably in the two or three years after an infection. 
Time may erode levels of covid antibodies as well.

Coronaviruses mutate more slowly than viruses like influenza and H.I.V., but, over the course of a decade or two, they can still change enough to evade our immune memory.

The city of Manaus, in the Brazilian Amazon, is a case that has given researchers some reason for concern. 
In early 2020, the coronavirus spread there virtually unchecked; by October, tests showed that about half of the city’s inhabitants harbored antibodies, leading some scientists to declare that the area had reached herd immunity. 
But, in December, the city experienced a second coronavirus surge that was even more severe than the first, causing more hospitalizations and deaths than the initial wave.
Early evidence has shown that antibodies created in response to the original coronavirus seem to provide less protection against the Gamma variant; 

The virus will continue to circulate at low levels, but its spread will be slower, and most infections will be less severe. 
Certain groups, such as the elderly and the immunocompromised, will still be at higher risk for severe complications; the vulnerable may die of covid-19 the way they die of influenza and pneumonia today. 
But the risks will be lower for individuals who have some immune resistance. 
For most of us, covid will become a familiar foe, like the flu—one of the background hazards of daily life.

There will probably be covid seasons, like flu seasons, in the winter; every few years, as new variants accumulate, a season might be especially bad.

The prospect of a long-term future with covid might come as a disappointment. 
Smallpox, the only human virus ever eradicated, was successfully eliminated in 1980, after a lengthy vaccination campaign; the global eradication of polio is in its final stage.
We’d like the coronavirus to recede into historical memory, too. And yet immune memory doesn’t always last, especially for a changing virus. Our bodies won’t remember covid perfectly, and so our minds won’t be able to forget.

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-medicine/coexisting-with-the-coronavirus?