- Early in the pandemic, many people seized on the hope that Covid-19 could be stopped in its tracks and buried for good once vaccines rolled out.
- With Covid expected to become a fixture — and considering how fast the omicron variant spreads — some infectious disease experts now think most everyone could be infected during their lifetimes.
- Vaccinations would remain central, as would precaution for vulnerable people.
- A virus becomes endemic as people grow overall immunity to disease through vaccination or infection.
Many individuals believed early in the epidemic that if immunizations were available, Covid-19 might be halted in its tracks and buried for good as reported by NBC News.
Dealing with virus
But hope for a zero-Covid country fizzled for most scientists long ago.
“Everyone has stopped talking about getting rid of Covid,” Dr Elizabeth Halloran, an epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said of her fellow researchers.
“It’s not going away, and that means it’s going to be endemic.”
Most scientists now expect the virus to circulate indefinitely with lower and more predictable case numbers — a status known as endemicity.
That would make the coronavirus like many other viruses that humanity has learned to deal with, such as influenza.
A fixture?
There are some indications that government and public health officials are already operating with that idea in mind.
With Covid expected to become a fixture — and considering how fast the omicron variant spreads — some infectious disease experts now think most everyone could be infected during their lifetimes.
“The real question is how severe that infection is going to be.”
Even if endemic Covid becomes inevitable, however, it doesn’t mean people should stop taking preventive measures, experts say.
Vaccinations would remain central, as would precaution for vulnerable people.
Dynamic equilibrium
And in the near term, as the omicron variant rages, it remains critical that people — including the vaccinated — try to avoid becoming infected now, when the pandemic is spiking.
The health care system could soon be under siege, hospital workers are exhausted, and there aren’t enough treatment tools, like monoclonal antibodies and antiviral pills.
“There’s a responsibility to the community,” Riedo said.
A virus becomes endemic as people grow overall immunity to disease through vaccination or infection.
Waning immunity keeps the virus from dying out completely.
But it’s a “dynamic equilibrium,” Halloran said, and the prevalence of the virus can wax and wane depending on factors like the season.
Pandemic to endemic
It typically takes a few years for a new viral pathogen to move from pandemic to endemic, said Maslov’s research partner, Alexei Tkachenko, a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York.
“We cannot say it will be so low we don’t care.”
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci, wrote last week with colleagues that the virus is unlikely to be eradicated and that they expect “periodic outbreaks and endemics.”
Endemic diseases often settle into more predictable and stable patterns.
Influenza, for example, spikes somewhat predictably during colder months.
“The real open question for me — or maybe for public health or all of us — is when it becomes endemic and people become infected, how much severe disease and death does it cause?”
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Source: NBC News
