So what to do? According to Bar-Yam, our actions are playing 'nice' with the virus rather than trying to eliminate it. 'The current situation is not an end game it's just a way of perpetuating the harm that the virus is doing, both to our health and the economy.' At that point, we may be forced to give booster shots or new vaccines with protection against multiple variants (multivalent vaccines) – the same strategy that is employed with flu vaccines, and with only modest success at best. It is during this time that new problems will arise, especially the emerging variants that will reduce the effectiveness of current vaccines. Part of (but not all of) the problem is that Bar-Yam estimates it will take 6-12 months to give vaccine shots to protect the population.

The problem is that there is not an end to this that we see, even with the vaccination. What we end up doing is giving up our ability to do what we want to do, and we have the virus around that is causing all the disease, disability, and long-term consequences. What we've been doing is the 'live-with-a-virus' strategy, which is not working very well. Rather than eliminating the virus most of the world has instead been employing a 'live-with-a-virus strategy'. When asked what our strategy for eliminating the virus (and whether we've already been doing that) Bar-Yam says no. There is a wide variety of opinions about the value of the use of lockdowns as a method of controlling the spread of COVID, ranging from 'a complete waste of time that did more harm than good' to 'they weren't done strictly enough.' Those in the first camp are not going to like what they read in a Medscape Interview where John Whyte, MD, MPH, who has been writing about public health for two decades, interviews Yaneer Bar-Yam, Ph.D., an expert in the quantitative analysis of pandemics, in an article entitled 'Here's the COVID Exit Door - Will We Walk Through It?' Here are some of the highlights of the interview.

Get rid virus free