Experts say they’re not ready to call the coronavirus endemic just yet.
A team assembled by the World Health Organization recently visited Wuhan to research where COVID-19 came from, but it could be years before there are clear answers about how the outbreak started.The United States marked a new stage in the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic when President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address Tuesday that"COVID-19 no longer need control our lives.
For a pandemic to reach an endemic phase, it would need to be"a situation where you have a background level” of disease, said Dr. Daniel McQuillen, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and a senior physician in the division of infectious diseases at Beth Israel Lahey Health in Massachusetts.
Without knowing if there may be another variant on the horizon and without a predictable pattern of disease, it’s still too soon to tell if the nation has reached an endemic phase.A product stall filled with free N95 respirator masks, provided by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, sits outside the pharmacy at this Jackson, Miss., Kroger grocery store, Feb. 2, 2022.
“We’re going from trying to prevent disease completely to going more to how do we deal with preventing severe illness and hospitalizations and how do we prevent our health care system from getting so swamped that we can’t take care of even normal problems,” he said.This must be determined at a local level.
Despite the new guidelines, many experts are hesitant to say the nation has entered an endemic phase just yet, as only time will tell if a new variant will arise and cause similar upheaval. To prepare for and prevent another wave, McQuillen, Goepfert and Chida each emphasized the importance of building better infrastructure for public health initiatives. This includes equitable vaccine distribution across the globe and increasing supply of treatments and testing -- items currently outlined in the White House’s new pandemic policy agenda.
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