The flu comes back every year. Will coronavirus?
, and Yang said colds aren’t as strongly seasonal as the flu is. Another counterexample, Yang said, is SARS, which in 2003 made some people sick in late spring in Toronto — in other words, a place with warmer conditions similar to those in much of the United States. In other words, waiting for the season to change should not be your plan for stopping the spread of a novel virus.
Which brings us to the other part of the problem. “SARS didn’t just disappear,” Yang said. Unlike the flu, SARS flared up on the global stage and then vanished. It hasn’t come back seasonally. But there’s nothing about the SARS virus itself that made it a one-time thing, somehow physically different from perennial viruses that pester us on an annual basis. “It disappeared because of very stringent public health control and intervention,” she told me.
Turns out, another of the biggest factors in whether a virus becomes seasonally recurrent is whether it reaches a level of transmission that is pandemic endemic . You can stop that from happening, as with SARS, by tightly monitoring the spread of a novel virus — watching the people who have been exposed, isolating the people who are sick, cutting off the virus’s access to new hosts.
But if you don’t do that — or you don’t do it effectively — a new virus can easily become a recurrent one. Flu is pandemic and endemic. It doesn’t disappear every summer. It’s just biding its time, hanging out in human bodies , ready to spread again once conditions improve. SARS never became pandemic and endemic — largely because of a lot of human effort, and partly because of a convenient tendency to not be very transmissible until victims showed symptoms of infection.
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