U of S microbiologist confident vaccines will spell end to COVID

He’s not a fortune teller and he admits he doesn’t have a crystal ball, but one of the province’s top clinical microbiologists believes as vaccination programs ramp up, the end of COVID-19 will come.

“There’s some optimism to think, if it doesn’t go away completely, it’ll just be there in the background,” said Dr. Joseph Blondeau, who works at Royal University Hospital at the University of Saskatchewan.

Appearing on Gormley on Friday, Blondeau said there are a number of coronaviruses that pop up each year, and while it’s conceivable this strain could persist, he thinks the vaccines currently approved or about to be will be enough to snuff out COVID.

Of course, part of how quickly that happens depends on how well the public sticks to the basics.

“This is lost on some folks, unfortunately,” he said. “They don’t understand actually maintaining that distance between you and somebody else is important. Wearing a mask is actually important, whether it’s the original strain or whether it’s the variant.”

New data has come out of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that has looked into what percentage of people diagnosed with COVID had no symptoms early on in the pandemic.

The research put that number at around 17 per cent of people who were infected but showed no signs or symptoms. Saskatchewan’s modelling shows there might have been nearly 20,000 people who had the virus but didn’t show symptoms.

For that reason, Blondeau said an individual should consider anyone who’s not inside their immediate bubble as potentially infectious.

He said with more data like this — coupled with increased testing, whether it’s specific or rapid testing — the medical community should eventually get a better handle of how widespread the virus might be, who can spread it and how it’s spread.