When will we see a COVID-19 vaccine is anybody's guess. At present, the candidate by Oxford and AstraZeneca is the closest one to production, being in its last phase of human trials since June end. Once tested, the vaccine will go into production and will be available for public use in September.
That, however, will not mark the end of the pandemic. The limited availability will be first cater to the regions with dire need of the vaccine. Even at maximum production capacity, the vaccine will not be enough to ensure mass immunity in a region.
The threat of Coronavirus contamination will thus still be very real even after the vaccine is available. In such a scenario, the world will have to live with other precautionary measures, including face masks and social distancing, potentially for several years, states a top pandemic expert.
Eric Toner, a Senior Scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center, is an expert on pandemics, having prepared several plans and run numerous simulations around them for years. He has been actively guiding the world leaders on how best to prepare for a pandemic, even before the word “pandemic” was a commonly used noun.
In a recent interview with CNET,?Toner has shared his belief on what the COIVD-19 stricken world should expect going forward.
"I think that mask wearing and some degree of social distancing, we will be living with -- hopefully living with happily -- for several years," Toner said.
The logic behind it was simple. While he does not see the pandemic dying out on its own anytime soon, he assures that simple precautionary measures can help people carry on with their lives.
Social distancing and the use of face masks are the most critical of these, as they are enough to cut down the risk of Covid-19 transmission substantially among two individuals.??
What Toner says has been proved by several researches over time, from different centres across the world. No matter what the researches aim to find, they all have one conclusion in common - wearing face masks in public reduces the risk of COVID-19 transmission.
In fact, for those still arguing against their use, a Twitter user named Mats recently shared links of 70 researches from around the world that prove that face masks are effective against COIVD-19 transmission.
With his experience, Toner was able to predict such an epidemic beforehand. He hinted it in his response to a question asked to him by CNET report author Claire Reilly in June last year, five months before novel coronavirus cases were first reported.
"Is there a chance that we could be caught off guard by some sort of horrible, mutant bat influenza?" she asked.
"Yes," Toner replied. "And we probably will be."
So we can safely assume that it is in our interest to adhere to the advice from the expert here.