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This story originally appeared onSTAT, a health and medicine website that provides ambitious coverage of the coronavirus. Goherefor more stories on the virus. TrySTATPlusfor exclusive analysis of biotech, pharma, and the life sciences. And check out STATsCOVID-19 tracker. As the world wearies of trying to suppress the SARS-CoV-2 virus, many of us are wondering what the future will look like as we try to learn to live with it. Will it always have the capacity to make us so sick? Will our immune systems learn and remember how to cope with the new threat? Will vaccines be protective and long-lasting?These pressing questions gained even greater urgency Monday with the news that scientists in Hong Kong have confirmed a 33-year-old man was reinfected with Covid-19; his second infection as diagnosed by airport screening came 4. 5 months after his first infection in March. Ive been thinking about it a lot, Malik Peiris, a coronavirus expert at the Hong Kong University who was one of the co-discoverers of SARS-1, said when asked about the question of immunity. Peiris isnt alone. STAT asked a number of experts to map out scenarios of how we might come to coexist with this new threat. In a time of uncertainty, the scenarios they sketched were actually hopeful, even if the relief most envisage is not immediately around the corner. I dont think well be wearing masks in two to three years for this virus, said Vineet Menachery, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Menachery laid out four possible scenarios for how humans might interact with SARS-2 over time in other words, what kind of immunity we might expect. Some of the terms are of his own creation, so they may not be instantly recognizable to people who have studied immunology. They also cover a spectrum, and the lines between some of the scenarios can be blurry in spots. But they provide a useful
