Even assuming the U.S. picks up the pace on vaccinations, there will still be gaps in protection. The two COVID-19 vaccines currently authorized in the U.S., made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, are both about 95% effective at preventing disease, but there is a small subset of people for whom they will not work. It’s also unclear whether being vaccinated means you cannot transmit the virus to others. And there will always be people who choose not to or are unable to get vaccinated. Plus, children younger than 16 are not currently eligible for vaccination, which means the virus may keep spreading among young people until vaccinemakers complete studies on children, hopefully sometime this year.
All that means the U.S. is unlikely to eliminate COVID-19 in the near future, says Saskia Popescu, an assistant professor of biodefense at George Mason University. A country like New Zealand–an island nation with about 5 million residents–will have an easier time stamping out a virus than a global travel hub with 330 million citizens living across more than 50 states and territories. But even if elimination is far off, “I think we’ll enter a phase of low-level prevalence,” says Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. “Yes, there [will be] a disease among us, but there are many diseases among us.”