NEW HAVEN, Conn. (WTNH) — Many people wonder when the COVID-19 pandemic will be over. A new published study sheds light on that.

The senior author of that study was Caroline Zeiss, a professor of comparative medicine at the Yale School of Medicine.

“So we were interested right from the beginning like everybody else, when is this going to end?” Zeiss said.

One thing revealed is that since people can get COVID-19 again, even after being vaccinated or infected, it is not going away any time soon. The study estimated we could reach an endemic state in two years.

This is how Zeiss describes the term endemic.

“It will start to look like the common cold or flu, where we have a fairly regular reinfection rate, so every year or a couple of times every year we will see a spike.”

Scientists took information from COVID-19 in rats and modeled it on humans.

Zeiss said it will be like the coronaviruses that cause the common cold and return year after year.

“If you think of the common cold, we don’t get vaccinated for that. We accept that we’re going to get it once or twice a year and that’s OK because it doesn’t make you very ill.”

Zeiss said that time is not here yet with COVID-19 but her models show it could happen.

“In two years, it’s going to look like a different virus than it looks now. Transmissibility has been going up with every variant so you’ve noticed it’s been shooting around much faster, but the pathogenicity has been going down.”

Zeiss points out that no one knows for sure how this virus will mutate. She said continuing to get COVID-19 vaccines and boosters and using safety measures is still key because these measures were figured into their study.