Covid is here for good, scientists say. The rest remains unpredictable.

With Covid expected to become a fixture  — and considering how fast the omicron variant spreads — some infectious disease experts now think most everyone could be infected during their lifetimes.“It seems to me it’s almost inevitable you’re going to become infected,” said Dr. Francis Riedo, an infectious disease physician at EvergreenHealth, a hospital system in Kirkland, Washington. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, wrote last week with colleagues that the virus is unlikely to be eradicated and that they expect “periodic outbreaks and endemics.” A survey in February in the journal Nature found that nearly 9 of 10 researchers working on the coronavirus thought Covid would become endemic.Endemic diseases often settle into more predictable and stable patterns. “The really open question for me — or maybe for public health or all of us — is when it becomes endemic and people become infected, how much severe disease and death does it cause?” Halloran said.An endemic version of Covid could look somewhat similar to the flu, according to a projection by Trevor Bedford, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.Bedford said he thinks endemic Covid could mean that most people would be infected about every three years, on average, with most cases quite mild. “With Covid, even if you’re vaccinated, some people are going to die, and the average age of those individuals is in their 80s,” Riedo said.