Dr. Cillian De Gascun:

I should clarify that if we look to other human coronaviruses that have crossed the species barrier and become endemic, four of them have managed to do that. SARS Cov-2 has certainly at this point in time achieved its aspiration of becoming readily transmissible from person-to-person. It establishes itself in a new host, it adapts to that new host and there is no reason to believe, in the absence of a significant intervention, whether that is a vaccine, a treatment or some other event, that it will not manage to become endemic. From the point of view as to how it will evolve from a severity perspective over the coming years and decades, it would be foolish of me to try to predict that. We do not know when the other seasonal coronaviruses crossed the species barrier so we do not know what sort of diseases they caused when they first crossed over and whether that has changed over time. Obviously they now cause a mild illness.