Like it or not, experts assume that for the time being, the coronavirus cannot be eradicated. But does that mean we will have to keep living under it's shadow, as we have for the last 18 months?
A team of scientists recently grappled with this question in an article in the journal Nature.
They start off optimistically enough, by saying that a realistic expectation is that the pandemic will be brought under control thanks to global efforts to vaccinate.
However, as the team of authors point out, there will still be developments and uncertainties that are unforeseeable at the moment.
Of the three conceivable scenarios put forward by the team, one is especially worrying: That humanity will not be able to bring the pandemic under control swiftly enough and will continue to deal with severe courses of the disease and high infection rates in the future - which could in turn favour the further development of the virus.
A second, and more likely, scenario is that the coronavirus will become more of a seasonal disease, like influenza.
In this case, effective therapies, like antibody preparations made in a laboratory, could help massively reduce the severity of the disease and the rate of hospital admissions and deaths, write the authors.
This view is shared by Gernot Marx, president of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (Divi), who expects SARS-CoV-2 to be seen like influenza.
"Coronavirus patients will still end up in intensive care units in steady numbers, just not the above-average numbers seen during the height of pandemic," he tells the Handeslblatt newspaper recently.
Normal flu, which may sound harmless to some, is still associated with several hundred thousand deaths worldwide every year, as the authors of the Nature article point out. "This is an extremely significant health burden and equates to a relatively 'optimistic' view of the future of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic," they write.
The third - and most optimistic - option would be the coronavirus transitioning into a disease with much less severe symptoms, similar to other viruses in the coronavirus family, which can cause illnesses like the common cold. However, the authors stress numerous times that it's not possible to predict with certainty whether SARS-CoV-2 will take a more or less severe course as it further adapts to people.
In any case, the authors says that there's no chance the coronavirus will start to eventually evolve towards a pathogen with less severe symptoms until there is more widespread immunity in the population.
The authors point to the 1918 influenza pandemic: Descendents of the H1N1 pathogen would have continued to cause epidemics into the 1950s.
The development of variants that can still affect the vaccinated and recovered also remains a risk, according to the article. Even as vaccination campaigns continue worldwide, there are still many places where the pandemic is far from being under control, increasing the risk that more viral diversity will emerge. Being able to predict such developments with new tools would be beneficial, they write.
As the authors note, however, so far only a relatively limited number of mutations have appeared independently of each other in multiple variants, suggesting convergent, and possibly a restricted, evolution of the coronavirus.
This point is also supported by German virologist Christian Drosten.
"From a virological point of view, there are good reasons to assume that SARS-CoV-2 does not have that much more in store than what it has been able to show us so far," he tells the Swiss online magazine Republik recently. Drosten adds that he expects SARS-CoV-2 to behave more like a common cold-causing coronavirus down the line.
He says a transition phase should be expected in the next two to four years and the virus will take advantage of gaps in vaccination rates.
