In few years, Covid-19 will be 'just another virus' in our lives

The calls from some quarters to stop publishing daily case totals may be premature for a disease that's still killing thousands of people a day

In the days before Covid, I’d often get frustrated by the response that doctors would give when I turned up at their clinics with some infection or other: “It’s just a virus,” they’d say.
 

As someone who’s long been fascinated by the detective work that goes into tracing the origins and history of infections,(1) the answer always seemed too perfunctory. Which virus was it? Where and when did this strain emerge? How many other people were getting infected with this same variant this year?

Those questions aren’t of much relevance to most general practitioners, because the majority of viruses simply