Life unlikely to get back to normal until coronavirus vaccine is found, leading scientist warns

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Normal life is unlikely to resume until a coronavirus vaccine is in circulation, a scientist has warned
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Imogen Braddick8 April 2020

Normal life is unlikely to resume until a vaccine is found for Covid-19, a leading scientist has warned.

Dr Ali Nouri, president of the Federation of American Scientists, said finding a vaccine and getting it into circulation may take up to a year said no one was "going back to our daily lives" anytime soon.

"We will certainly have to continue these stay at home orders for I suspect at least through the end of May, or perhaps some time in June," the infectious disease expert told the Daily Mail.

"There's not going to be a time when there is a magic date and then everybody goes back to their lives as normal. That's not going to happen for a long time."

A leading scientist has warned life will not return to normal for a long time - until a vaccine is found
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He added: "Once June comes around, once July comes around, it's not going to be the kind of situation where people are going to be going to crowded restaurants and movie theatres.

"Things are going to be different, I suspect, until we have the vaccine."

Dr Nouri, a microbiologist and a virologist, said the United States, which has more than 400,000 confirmed cases, was far from "flattening the curve".

He also pointed out that Wuhan in China was still enforcing some measures nearly four months after lockdown was introduced.

Dr Nouri, who served in Congress advising Senators Jim Webb and Al Franken for 10 years before taking up his current role, said: "That really tells you that this virus has the potential to really flare up again, even in places that have flattened the curve.

"If we do really do a good job of flattening that curve and reducing the number of transmissions from person to person, we still have to be very careful while we lift those restrictions."

He added: "What's really different about this novel coronavirus is that it's this combination of both being very contagious and then also at the same time being about 10 times more lethal than the flu."

Dr Nouri has served as an advisor in the office of then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, and as a research associate at Princeton University where he developed initiatives to improve global health.

The World on Coronavirus lockdown

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He said: "The really challenging part of this is that the virus can be passed on asymptomatically.

"As high as 25 per cent of infections turn out to be coming from people who don't even know that they themselves are infected.

"We need a lot more diagnostic testing. We need to really have a really good idea of the dynamics of the infection; who's infected, who's not infected.

"So when we actually do leave our homes, when we do identify new cases, we can quickly introduce mitigation measures again on areas that are impacted."

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