Question: when do you think a cure to covid be found aprox

Carissa Wong answered on 6 Nov 2020: last edited 6 Nov 2020 4:00 pm

Hi, great question. It’s really hard to say at the moment when we will have the closest thing to a ‘cure’ for covid. But the best chance we have of stopping the disease spreading is by using vaccines. A vaccine introduces either a small fragment of a disease-causing germ (in this case the covid-19 virus), a weakened or dead form of a germ, or a toxin produced by the germ into your body, usually via injection.

The vaccine trains your immune system to fight off the germ, so that when you are exposed to the live germ, for example, when an infected person coughs or sneezes onto you, your immune system can quickly recognise and destroy it before you fall ill.

Currently there are several vaccines being developed, some of which may work better than others to stop covid-19 spreading. It will take time for scientists to work out which vaccines work the best against covid-19, but hopefully there could be some ready to use in 2021. It also takes time because scientists make sure the vaccines are super safe, and so there are a lot of checks to do. I’m not researching into covid myself and I don’t study viruses, but as someone who studies the immune system I know about vaccines.

The key to vaccines, is that when enough people in the population has received the vaccine, protecting them from the disease, something called ‘herd immunity’ develops.

Herd immunity is where vaccinated members of the population form a protective shield around those who haven’t yet been or cannot be vaccinated. The vaccinated people protect the vulnerable from catching the disease from infected members (infected people= covid-19 virus is in their bodies) of the population.

Hopefully this can give you an idea of what we are trying to develop to try to stop covid spreading, for now it’s still too early to say when the vaccines we need will be available!