It is a question so many of us have asked: How is this pandemic going to end?

We thought the vaccines would put a stop to it, but then came the delta variant, and then omicron. Other variants may still emerge.

To get a better sense of our future, “LA Times“ assistant editor Jessica Roy looked at our past and how we overcame previous pandemics. In an interview for “LA Times Today,” Roy told host Lisa McRee about what we can learn from previous pandemics.

When Roy started researching this story, she thought it would be about how the COVID-19 pandemic would end. When no end was in sight, she investigated how other pandemics and endemics ended.

“What might be interesting is to look at how did the Spanish flu and we emerged from the pandemic. We had a bunch of other ones, even just in the last hundred years. We do not have polio anymore, and whatever happened with Ebola? And how did SARS go away? So, if we can’t figure out how to end this pandemic, how did we end the last century of them?” Roy said.

In the early 20th century, the Spanish flu swept across the world. After it faded away, the United States entered the so-called Roaring ‘20s.

“The Spanish flu was very interesting. It affected young people a lot more than coronavirus did. The death rate was similar in the United States. It was about 1.6% for COVID, and it was about 2.5% for the Spanish flu. But it just swept through [communities] and everybody got sick and then it burned out. One thing people that I interviewed for this story told me was that we didn’t have the same level of travel then that we do now. It was not like your neighbor was just getting back from Hawaii, and another neighbor had picked it up when they were in Italy over winter break. And so it stayed much more localized and really burned through a community until everybody either got sick and got better, or got sick and died,” Roy explained.

Another disease that wreaked havoc in the 20th century was smallpox. The disease is now eradicated, but it has left an immense impact.

“It caused 300 million deaths just in the 20th century. It is responsible for quite a lot of the indigenous deaths in North America after colonizers arrived here. It was a scary, scary, scary disease, and it was one of the first ones that had a vaccine. It was one of the first ones that even before vaccines we inoculated for. George Washington mandated smallpox inoculations for his troops. The World Health Organization came together and said they were going to make a global effort to vaccinate our way out of this. Functionally, smallpox is the only disease we have fully eradicated. The only smallpox cases that still exist now are samples in laboratories,” Roy said.

In the early 2000s, the SARS virus broke out. In her research, Roy realized the disease was not as worrisome as she remembered it to be.

“I was in high school when SARS was going on, and I remember hearing so much about it. I was really shocked actually, when I dug into it and saw there were few cases in the United States, and a very, very few deaths. I remember people were very freaked out about it. SARS is a coronavirus. Our COVID-19 is SARS-CoV-2. They are very, very similar. But there was no asymptomatic spread of SARS. If you had SARS, you were coughing, you felt ill,” she said.

Swine flu and Ebola were also serious diseases of the 2000s. Roy explained how we came out on the other side of those diseases.  

“Swine flu was much more infectious, but a lot less deadly. It did cause hospitals to be overwhelmed. Schools were shut down in 2009, but they developed vaccine fast enough that they were able to add it to flu shots by October of that year. It was incredible. With Ebola, we controlled the public health measures. That’s another one where if you have it and you’re sick and you know it,” Roy said.

According to experts, the current COVID-19 pandemic will not be eradicated forever. However, it could fade to a manageable number of cases, allowing pre-pandemic life to re-emerge.

“Unfortunately, the point where we could have fully eradicated coronavirus forever is in the past. That is really not a possibility anymore. It seems like, yes, this will become an endemic disease where there will be a certain number of deaths per year, but that we will improve treatment and hopefully keep vaccinating people and reduce that number to a much, much lower amount,” Roy explained.

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