A leading US epidemiologist has told RTÉ News that the coronavirus will be "with us humans for all eternity". Speaking on RTÉ's This Week, Dr Mike Osterholm, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said: "We are unfortunately in a world that will always have it circulating somewhere.
The question is going to be how well do we control it," he said. Dr Osterholm said this coronavirus is behaving differently to the previous ten pandemics going back 250 years.
Unlike flu pandemics, he said, Covid-19 is not coming in waves. "We weren’t sure what this coronavirus would do because we’ve never witnessed a pandemic of a coronavirus before.