A vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is still more than a year away, but some individuals, and governments, are hoping that life can return to normal once enough of us have had the disease.

But estimates that 70-80 percent of the population are going to be infected are way too high, Sam Scarpino says. “It’s going to be somewhere like 5 to 20 percent, and you’re going to have multiple waves of infections because you’re still going to have a large fraction of the population susceptible.” The difference between these numbers, Scarpino said, originates with some of the simplifications that epidemiological modelers make to estimate how a disease will spread.

This article was originally published on News@Northeastern on April 23, 2020. To continue reading, click here.