When will COVID pandemic be over?
CT experts say it’s complicated
When the World Health Organization officially declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus said, “Pandemic is not a word to use lightly or carelessly.”
But how the pandemic comes to a close may not be so clear, according to public health experts. While there are metrics that will help policymakers and scientists determine when the pandemic ends, it is also a matter of perception.
There is a somewhat formal definition of a “pandemic.” A disease needs to have reached all five continents. It needs to spread, uncontrolled, within communities.
There’s also “some judgment of how many lives need to be lost,” said Art Caplan, the head of bioethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, and a Ridgefield resident. But “there’s no magic number. It’s values.”
“If the WHO declares something is a pandemic, does America care?” Caplan asked.
Soon after the World Health Organization’s declaration, then-President Donald Trump declared a national emergency.
“This global pandemic is continuing to have a major impact on the lives of every person and entity in our state and around our country,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in March 2020, when he joined other governors in requesting a national emergency declaration.
Effective through March 1, 2021, that emergency declaration was extended indefinitely by President Joe Biden on Feb. 24, 2021.
Kenji Scott, a partner at Norwalk-based Technology Square Partners, said he advises his business clients that “the pandemic (emergency) ends (in the United States) whenever President Biden removes the national emergency order.”
“Based on President Biden’s record of ‘following science,’” Scott said, he expects that to be when the president’s science advisors “tell him that it’s safe, safe meaning that there are no threats of another uncontrolled wave affecting hundreds or thousands of citizens, to remove the order.”
Experts say COVID-19 will likely be around for a long time, abating here or there as immunity rises, then reemerging in waves, probably seasonally. So if the virus isn’t going away for good, will the pandemic never be over?
“If you look at it, it waxes and wanes,” said Rick Martinello, director of infection prevention at Yale New Haven Health. “It may be more accurate to say that instead of a pandemic ending, there's a transition period. And it transitions into what may be seen as a steady state.”
To some degree, experts say, the pandemic is over when we collectively decide that it’s over.
According to Ulysses Wu, the chief epidemiologist at Hartford HealthCare, the pandemic will be effectively over “once it becomes sporadic transmission, or even seasonal,” though to reach sporadic transmission on a global scale is not so simple, he said.
Caplan said the end of the pandemic will be signified by “people’s willingness to accept change and restrictions.”
“In some states, they’re not willing to accept that there’s a pandemic at all,” he said. “It’s partially a decision about how much damage we can live with.”
Caplan pointed to the flu, which some studies have estimated kills as many as 650,000 people every year.
“We’ve learned to live with a certain number of deaths from flu,” he said. “We never mandated flu shots for adults. We could. You could easily make the argument that flu is an epidemic.”
While Caplan said there is science behind the end of a pandemic — it might be a question of herd immunity thresholds and availability of vaccines.
“It’s not just science,” he said. “It’s science plus values."
“It’s science plus risk tolerance, which is variable among groups and people,” Caplan said.
Wu said the pandemic will continue for some people longer than others. People who are immunocompromised might act as though they are in the midst of a pandemic long after others.
“The pandemic is over until it affects them,” he said. “It’s an out of sight, out of mind thing at this point.”
And regardless of what experts say, Caplan believes collective society plays a role in deciding when the pandemic ends.
“People want to know when is something over,” he said. “It’s not necessarily over until we all say it's over. We might say it’s over sooner than the experts, we might say it’s over later than the experts.”
Caplan and Martinello emphasized how much politics plays a role in determining when the pandemic ends, Caplan arguing that “the end of the pandemic is very political.”
“It's really that intersection between the politicians and the epidemiologists,” Martinello said.
Pandemics cannot really be compared to other lifethreatening emergencies like a flood, a mudslide or a tornado, Martinello said. Those are all singular moments taking place over the course of minutes or hours, even though recovery may take days or months.
“Those are all finite incidents that occur at a point in time. And pandemics are not like that. They are spread out over a large period of time,” Martinello said. “We don't have clear distinctions. We're transitioning from one phase of our response into a recovery position. So it kind of blends.”