Someone has asked in another thread what is the end game for Covid-19? The posts are one too many I can’t find it though I also wanted to just add one more Covid-19 post hehehe. I decided to give it a personal extrapolation.
Covid-19 is one of the strain of Corona viruses that causes common cold. This strain mutated from animals and started causing infections in humans. This is a normal process that happens naturally after a long period of a virus mutating in animals. Civic-19 Is an important strain unlike the rest because it causes pneumonia. It’s also important because it’s spreading easily.
How is this going to end? A new virus can either mutate to be more virulent or into a weaker version. An example of a more virulent version occurring was the case of 1918 Spanish flu. Infections occurs in phases. Phase one happens then people seems to be fighting off the infection. Then phase 2 happens. It kills thousands or millions of people. If Phase 3 occurs, only the very lucky lives to tell the tale. The virus finally mutates into almost a harmless form that disappears into oblivion. When a virus mutates very fast, it’s more virulent. The period here is around 4 months: start to the end.
A virus can also mutate into a weaker version. This takes some time like one year. As the virus is transmitted from one person to the next, the virulence is weakened. It finally attains the status of a common cold causing virus or even disappears completely. By disappearing I mean it becomes non-symptoms causing strain in humans.
Coved-19 looks like it’s going to mutate into a weaker version. Based on when it started spreading massively to people, we are looking at it starting to mutate into a significantly weaker version around July 2020, after 6 months since February 2020. By October 2020, the symptoms will be very mild and by December 2020 no one will be talking about Covid-19.
What will the damage look like? We’re at the peak of this pandemic. By the end of April, number of cases will skyrocket to millions but mortality rate will stabilize as the virus starts to weaken gradually. We may get close to 100,000 deaths by December but not beyond that. However, the number of cases (known plus unknown) might go up to 5 million infections worldwide. This will be based on how well developing (3rd world) countries will manage to control spread.
I am not a prophet of doom but the highest number of cases might be in Developing countries. However, number of deaths will be relatively fewer because the virus reached Developing countries a bit later when the virus has started to weaken. Also, demographic factors - more younger people and fewer elderly people. Just to quote a figure, Africa and other developing countries might register more than 4 million cases and less than 1 million cases in all developed countries. Developed countries might register 70% of the deaths by the end of the pandemic. I don’t want to imagine a scenario where the virus mutates into a more virulent version because that might as well be considered the end of Africa and developing countries; as in, we have no capacity to handle this thing.
Will economies collapse? I am not well versed on this topic but I don’t think so. Economies will be severely impacted but they will not collapse. Economies collapse when there’s massive spending with minimal production to support the spending. For instance, during a world war. However, in our case right now, production will only be reduced to some extent but spending is only on food and medical related items. This might only be for the next 3 months.