A coronavirus vaccine begins clinical trials Monday — but it could be well over a year before you can get it

A clinical trial testing a vaccine that could potentially protect against the novel coronavirus will begin Monday, The Associated Press reports. That will be the day that a human patient receives his or her dose of the experimental vaccine.

Vaccines take between a year and 18 months to be fully validated, public health officials told the AP. But "the traditional vaccine timeline is 15 to 20 years. That would not be acceptable here," Mark Feinberg, the president and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, recently told STAT. "When you hear predictions about it taking at best a year or a year and a half to have a vaccine available … there's no way to come close to those timelines unless we take new approaches."

According to projections by the CDC that were reported by The New York Times, between 160 million and 214 million people could be infected, some 2.4 million to 21 million people could be hospitalized, and as many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die by the time the virus runs its course.