The coronavirus could become an infection that never goes away and causes seasonal outbreaks of illness, according to scientists.
Countries around the world are in the grip of the first ever epidemics of the virus, which has infected around 90,000 people and killed more than 3,000.
While the number of cases in South Korea, Italy and Iran continue to soar, the spread of the infection is beginning to come under control in China.
But scientists now say the coronavirus may never go away completely and that it could become a perennial illness like colds, chest infections and flu.
These are viral illnesses that go round every winter, cannot be cured and that people often don’t development immunity to because they change so often.
The coronavirus, which has so far killed just over three per cent of everyone who has caught it, could follow in the same footsteps and become a normalised illness.
A healthcare worker at Cremona Hospital in northern Italy inspects a swab sample from a suspected coronavirus patient. Around 1,700 people have now been infected with the illness in Italy and the government has almost a dozen towns on lockdown

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus (illustrated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is similar to the ones that cause the common cold, which mutate so often that people cannot become immune to the illness
‘If you look at other members of the coronavirus family, that are respiratory viruses and we’ve known about them for the last 50 years or more, they’re seasonal,’ Professor John Oxford, from Queen Mary University in London, told The Telegraph.
‘They’re just like the common cold, there’s probably a few thousand people infected with them at the moment in England.
‘Whether Covid-19 will fit into that pattern or not, we will just have to wait and see but my guess is it will.’
The coronavirus is currently causing a self-sustaining outbreak, which means it is constantly being passed on without anyone coming into contact with the original source.
It is thought to have broken out at an animal market in Wuhan, China, and since then has continued to spread among people.
As long as people continue to spread it to new areas faster than health authorities can isolate the infected communities, the virus will keep spreading.
When an illness becomes a permanent feature of a country or region it is described as endemic, meaning it is native there.
‘This is going to be with us for some time,’ said Dr Amesh Adalja, a disease expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
He told Business Insider: ‘It’s endemic in human populations and not going to go away without a vaccine.’
Scientists around the world are working to try and develop vaccines for the virus, with some already in animal trials, but the process is a lengthy and uncertain one.
Even if they are successful, the virus could mutate and become completely different to what the vaccine is able to protect against.
This is the case for flu, which has so many strains that the vaccine must change every year to try and match the strains most likely to infect people at that time. It is never perfect or able to offer full protection.
Coronaviruses are known to spread more quickly in the winter because they are able to survive for longer and reproduce more effectively in colder, drier weather – this makes them more likely to infect people.
And because the northern and southern hemispheres have their winters at different times, even a seasonal bug can continue to spread all year round.
Dr William Schaffner, from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told CNN: ‘We know respiratory viruses are very seasonal, but not exclusively.
‘One would hope that the gradual spring will help this virus recede [but] we can’t be sure of that.’