What serious viruses do is they take our lives, they take our livelihoods, and they take our way of life.

And it takes a while to recover from those shocks.

You know, it might not always feel like it, but we are inching closer to the end of the pandemic.

As more and more people get vaccinated and the virus continues to spread naturally through the population,

we get closer to herd immunity.

The point at which enough people are immune from the virus, that it can no longer spread easily.

Like lots of people, I've been imagining the end for months.

I think about what it's going to be like to go out to dinner with my wife and all the non-COVID stories.

I want to get back to covering.

But the truth is there's still a lot of uncertainty about what the end of the pandemic will really look like,

and what that's going to mean for our society.

For example, how will we deal with all the loss we have suffered?

How many people will have longstanding health complications from COVID?

Will life go back to what it was before?

On today's show, we're going to hear from what one doctor, slash sociologist,

has learned from looking at the aftermath of past pandemics,

and his opinion on how COVID-19 could end and what its long-term impacts might be.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent,

and this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

My name is Nicholas Christakis.

I'm a physician and social scientist at Yale, where I direct the Human Nature Lab,

and I'm the author of Apollo Zero, the profound and enduring impact of coronavirus on the way we live.

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