Tegan Taylor: Hello, this is Coronacast, a daily podcast all about the coronavirus. I'm health reporter Tegan Taylor.
Norman Swan: And I'm physician and journalist Dr Norman Swan. It's Wednesday, 18 August, 2021. I feel as if I've been away for a month, Tegan.
Tegan Taylor: I know, it has only been two days, Norman, but has it been enough to completely refresh and rejuvenate you and you're never going to need a holiday again?
Norman Swan: Absolutely, I'm just raring to go.
Tegan Taylor: That's what we want to hear. So, let's solve Covid today, Norman. You've been talking to one of the top global authorities on virology and he happens to be based here in Australia, Professor Eddie Holmes, who has been talking about different possible scenarios on how Covid might evolve and change over the coming years.
Norman Swan: Yes, and just to put Eddie Holmes in context, he is a world authority on viral evolution. He was the person who released the genome of SARS-CoV-2 to the world, having got it from his colleagues in China, and has been following it closely since. He does lots of other work but Covid has been taking his time as well. By the way, he has got a prediction of a way out of the pandemic but I'll come back to that later. So he has been surprised by Delta. He didn't predict it. He is calling this pandemic 2.0, in other words the rules have changed.
Tegan Taylor: Just with the Delta variant.
Norman Swan: Just with the Delta variant. It's not something that he thought…and he basically says it's very hard to create scenarios based on what you know before because there has not been virus like Covid before. So he really has shifted his thinking.
So rather than having one prediction he has got three scenarios that he thinks about for the future. The worst-case scenario is one where we just get around the corner and another horrible variant hit us, and then we just get around another corner and another variant hits us, so we are constantly fighting against variants which are more and more contagious, more and more virulent, more and more vaccine resistant. The best-case scenario is that COVID-19 terms into the common cold, and it's just like a mild influenza.
Tegan Taylor: So it might still be transmissible but it's not causing as severe disease.
Norman Swan: It's in the background, we don't worry about it. But he's got a middle ground scenario which he thinks is the most likely. It's kind of like influenza, where we build up some sort of resistance to it with a reasonably effective vaccine, and after a little while it re-emerges with a new variant, surges, and then we develop a new vaccine and it goes away again, so that's a sort of, if you like, a rollercoaster to some extent over time. So he thinks that's the most likely scenario of our way out of it. But when I asked him about New South Wales, he basically thinks the bus has long gone from New South Wales, it's going to be very difficult for New South Wales to pull back, and vaccination is really the way through in terms of hospitalisations and severe infections.
