It has been a year now since this whole mess with COVID-19 started its rampage on the United States.

In the past year, there have been at least 24,000,000 reported cases along with 400,000 reported deaths.

We’re never going to get the true numbers, but this is what they’re going to give us to go off of so we’ll just have to use it.

Now we have multiple vaccines to help combat this virus which have a ~95% effective rate at preventing the illness. There have been millions of Americans who have received the vaccine so far. Most of those so far that have been inoculated have been high-risk individuals, the elderly, and front-line workers.

Joe Biden has announced that he plans to have at least 50 million people vaccinated within the first few months of his regime.

Many times, vaccines lead to genetic mutations in the original virus. This is actually why many times people who get the flu shot still get the flu. It’s because there are so many variations of the flu now that “experts” are just trying to predict which one will be the most prominent in any given year. There just isn’t a vaccine that covers all of the flu mutations, and even if there was, it would just mutate again.

We know that it has mutated, but that the vaccine is effective against the mutations.

But the question is, going forward what does life look like living along side COVID-19? Is it ever going to be wiped out entirely? What about those who build up immunity?

Based on a recent study, the virus is here to stay, but the good news is that once you’re immune to it, it will not be any more threatening than the common cold.

The New York Times reported,

“The timing of how long it takes to get to this sort of endemic state depends on how quickly the disease is spreading, and how quickly vaccination is rolled out,” said Jennie Lavine, a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University in Atlanta, who led the study.

“So really, the name of the game is getting everyone exposed for the first time to the vaccine as quickly as possible.”

Dr. Lavine and her colleagues looked to the six other human coronaviruses — four that cause the common cold, plus the SARS and MERS viruses — for clues to the fate of the new pathogen.

The four common cold coronaviruses are endemic, and produce only mild symptoms. SARS and MERS, which surfaced in 2003 and 2012, respectively, made people severely ill, but they did not spread widely.

So keep your heads up everyone, this virus will no longer have a hold on society as it does today. The best thing to do right now is to build up your immune systems. This whole time, I’ve been seeing that adequate Vitamin D levels is a critical component to how you handle the virus. Most people in the U.S. are deficient and a recent report I read is that 9/10 deaths could have been prevented if they were not deficient in Vitamin D.

I’m no medical expert, but that is my two cents.