Covid: The ‘endemic’ phase is near
“The light at the end of the pandemic tunnel is growing,” said public-health researcher Sheldon Jacobson in TheHill.com. Daily new cases of Covid-19 have declined to about 70,000, less than half of the mid-September high, and as vaccination rates slowly rise and the Delta variant burns through the unvaccinated population, the virus now has “fewer people to infect.” But we’ll never get to zero Covid cases; instead, we’re on the road to Covid becoming an “endemic” disease, flaring up in pockets of the country and at certain times of the year, with a manageable number of hospitalizations and a limited number of deaths. Life won’t suddenly return to normal, said Sigal Samuel in Vox.com. Instead, the pandemic will wane as if controlled by a “dimmer switch,” as regions achieve different levels of immunity and different levels of risk tolerance.
The bad news is that “Covid is here to stay,” said Kyle Pfannenstiel in the Idaho Falls Post Register. Infectious-disease specialist Dr. Richard Nathan says that the highly infectious virus is in such widespread, global circulation that sooner or later, “every human on the planet is going to get a Covid-19 infection.” The good news is that as we transition from avoidance to living with the virus, vaccination will ward off serious illness for the vast majority of people. Immunity from infection, on the other hand, appears to wane after just six months. As a result, experts are increasingly skeptical that the U.S. will ever attain lasting herd immunity.
Still, “there are reasons for optimism,” said
Dr. Dhruv Khullar in NewYorker.com. Mandates have helped push 78 percent of adults to get at least one vaccine dose, “millions of vulnerable Americans are now getting booster shots,” and the vaccine will soon be approved for children ages 5 to 11. Americans can turn Covid into a “manageable problem” that might only require masking on mass transit or during peak seasons, said Dr. Leana Wen in WashingtonPost.com.
To achieve that, we’ll need widespread vaccination mandates, and outpatient treatments that keep cases mild, such as Merck’s “remarkable” antiviral pill that appears to cut hospitalizations roughly in half. We’ll also need “readily available rapid tests,” as they have in Japan and Canada, so that people can test themselves at home before social or family gatherings. “If we are armed with the right tools,” endemic Covid doesn’t need to “dominate our lives.”