You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hume. When will the pandemic end? That's a question all of us are asking, especially in the United States, which is struggling with record high infections. Today's episode is a little different. It's an explainer with three different strategies for how pandemics actually wind up fizzling out.

This lesson is from Ted Ed, Ted's Youth and Education Initiative, which my three children really enjoy.

I end up learning a lot from these videos, too.

You can find more lessons at ed. ted.com.

Consider this unfortunately familiar scenario.

Several months ago, a highly infectious, sometimes deadly, respiratory virus

infected humans for the first time.

It then proliferated faster than public health measures could contain it.

Now, the World Health Organization has declared a pandemic, meaning that it's spreading worldwide.

The death toll is starting to rise, and everyone is asking the same question. When will the pandemic end?

The WHO will likely declare the pandemic over once the infection

is mostly contained, and rates of transmission drop significantly throughout the world.

But exactly when that happens depends on what global governments choose to do next. They have

three main options. race through it,

delay and vaccinate, or coordinate and crush.

One is widely considered best, and it may not be the one you think.

In the first, governments and communities do nothing to halt the spread

and instead allow people to be exposed as

quickly as possible. Without time to study the virus, doctors know little about how to save their

patients and hospitals reach peak capacity almost immediately. Somewhere in the range of millions to

hundreds of millions of people die, either from the virus or the collapse of healthcare systems.

Soon, the majority of people have been infected and either perished or survived by building up their

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