Now, with health systems no longer overwhelmed and more than a year of no surprise variants of COVID, many infectious disease experts are declaring a shift in the crisis from pandemic to endemic.
“This is far beyond where we were in June 2021,” he wrote.
“Number three, the variants causing illness are Omicron and its progeny, the Omicron subvariants. And whether because of population immunity or because they are inherently less virulent, they are causing milder disease,” Schaffner said. “I’m more cautious about the developing world because our surveillance system there isn’t as good,” he said.
He also noted that vaccines have resulted in high levels of control of the disease in terms of reducing hospitalizations and deaths.“Even if we call it endemic, it’s still a serious virus that’s really putting a lot of a strain on our health care system.”Stuart Ray, MD, professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, said any endemic designation would be specific to a certain area.
“There are people with infections we don’t know about and something from that dynamic could surprise us,” he said. “We don’t have a metric for what is an acceptable level of mortality for an endemic. It’s defined more by our culture and our values and what we do end up accepting," she said."That’s why we’re seeing this tug of war between urgency and normalcy. We’re deciding where we place SARS-CoV-2 in our repertoire of threats.”
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