Living With Covid? Why Experts Say Virus May Never Settle Into A Seasonal Cycle Like Flu

Paddling pools are out, beer gardens are brimming. But a startling proportion of the population will be cooped up in their bedrooms having the strange experience of nursing a fever and sore throat in July as Covid infections continue to soar in the third major wave this year.

- Hannah Devlin

For most this will be an unpleasant inconvenience rather than a tragedy. But with a fourth wave expected in the autumn, a fifth potentially kicking off by Christmas and experts saying that Covid may never settle into a seasonal cycle, some are questioning whether this steady grind of illness is sustainable.

Seasonal flu has been a benchmark for Covid since the earliest phase of the pandemic, and in the spring a threshold was crossed when Covid became less deadly than seasonal flu for all age groups.

This was good news. However, the impact of an illness on society also depends on how many people are infected and how often. Many had assumed that by this point we might be at least heading towards a more regular pattern of infection with Covid, in which we would endure a few tough months during the winter and forget it for the rest of the year. Instead, the reverse appears to be occurring.

“The way that the pandemic has played out and is continuing to play out is unexpected,” said Dr Stephen Kissler, an epidemiologist at Harvard .

Kissler and colleagues published a highly influential paper in April 2020 that predicted seasonal resurgences of Covid “could occur as far into the future as 2025”. For many in the scientific community, this was a coin-drop moment that provided a glimpse of what lay beyond the first few months of catastrophe and crisis – and sowed the seed of expectation that Covid would become seasonal.