Podcast: The pandemic will end. We promise.

LA Times
·1 min read
FILE - In this July 18, 1962 file photo, a girl swallows a lump of sugar coated with a dose of the Sabin polio vaccine, served in a paper cup in Atlanta, Ga. Tens of millions of today's older Americans lived through the polio epidemic, their childhood summers dominated by concern about the virus. Some parents banned their kids from public swimming pools and neighborhood playgrounds and avoided large gatherings. Some of those from the polio era are sharing their memories with today's youngsters as a lesson of hope for the battle against COVID-19. Soon after polio vaccines became widely available, U.S. cases and death tolls plummeted to hundreds a year, then dozens in the 1960s, and to U.S. eradication in 1979.(AP Photo/File)
In 1962, a child in Atlanta swallows a lump of sugar coated with a dose of polio vaccine, served in a paper cup. Less than two decades later, eradication of polio in the U.S. was complete. (Associated Press)

The COVID-19 era is rough, to say the least. But let's put it in perspective. Every pandemic ends eventually, and this one will too.

Today, assistant editor Jessica Roy with the L.A. Times' utility journalism team walks us through a century of past pandemics — from the 1918 flu to SARS — and the different ways they resolved, and she describes what's likely to happen in our future.

Then medical historian Frank Snowden, a professor emeritus at Yale, reaches further back to explore how pandemics have changed society and what we've learned from them.

Host: Gustavo Arellano

Guests: L.A. Times utility journalism assistant editor Jessica Roy and Yale professor emeritus of history Frank Snowden

More reading:

Will this pandemic ever end? Here’s what happened with the last ones

CDC shifts pandemic goals away from reaching herd immunity

From the archives: April 2020: From the Black Death to AIDS, pandemics have shaped human history. Coronavirus will too

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.