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Despite worldwide efforts to contain the new coronavirus, hotspots continue to emerge, and the number of cases is on the rise.

It’s been only a couple of months since the virus, called SARS-CoV-2, made its first public appearance in a seafood-and-live-animal market in Wuhan, China. Since then, the virus has hopped borders, infected over 82,500 people and killed 2,810. But as with all past outbreaks, this one will eventually come to an end.

So, how will this story wrap up? Experts say one possibility is that cases of the disease will start decreasing when enough people develop immunity, either through infection or vaccination. Another possible scenario is that the virus will continue to circulate and establish itself as a common respiratory virus.

A vaccine for eradication

But health officials aren’t just sitting back and waiting to see how the virus will behave; researchers worldwide are racing to find a vaccine and treatment for SARS-CoV-2. Because the virus has “established itself in human populations, a vaccine is the only way to eradicate it,” Adalja said. 

Recently, a group of researchers mapped out the detailed structure of the so-called spike protein that the new coronavirus uses to latch onto and infect human cells, potentially opening the door to a vaccine. The idea is that if people were to be injected with a spike-protein-based vaccine, their bodies would make antibodies against it so that, if they were ever exposed to the real virus, they would have immunity, Live Science previously reported.

But the problem with vaccines is that “it takes so long to go from the potential vaccine to the animal model to the types of clinical trials [needed], and there’s only so many steps you can cut out without jeopardizing safety,” Cioe-Peña said. And so a vaccine isn’t going to help with the spread of the virus in epicenters right now, he added. 

Still, experts think a vaccine is likely 18 to 24 months away, which is still expedited from the 10 years it typically takes, according to the Live Science report. But the fact that experts are continuing to develop a vaccine means that they don’t think SARS-CoV-2 will disappear anytime soon, Epstein said. If health officials thought the virus would vanish soon, “then building a vaccine for the future would not make much sense,” Epstein told Live Science. “There’s a sense in which it may not end.”