Episode 101: From Killer to Common Cold – Discussing COVID-19

Dr. David Graham returns again this week to discuss his newly published book, From Killer to Common Cold. The book touches upon the topics we have discussed on this show for a few months now. The central theme of the book is how SARS-CoV-2 will transition from the pandemic killer COVID-19 to a common cold coronavirus.

Dr. Graham expertly lays out his case in a short book that is easy to digest in just a few hours of reading. He sets a background of what viruses are, basic physiology and epidemiology, and history. He discusses what features make this coronavirus like the others that currently circulate freely amongst humans and how it is different. Most persuasively, he makes the case for how one of the current endemic viruses, OC43, went from pandemic to endemic some time in the late 1800s.

His argument is persuasive and is playing out before our eyes. Efforts to prevent the spread of the virus have proven mostly ineffective or temporizing. Even those countries that have managed to contain its spread find that as soon as they give even a tiny glimmer of an opening, the virus finds its way into the population.

So Dr. Graham argues that containment is essentially hopeless we need to figure out where we will eventually end up and how we will learn to live with this virus. He states that if it is similar to other coronaviruses we won't be able to vaccinate it away or find effective treatments. Probably, humans will develop partial immunity to the virus and after multiple exposures will experience only mild cold symptoms. After all, it seems as if the worst elements of the virus are not the virus' effects as much as our own bodies' immune responses.