There’s growing consideration in the medical community that the COVID-19 pandemic could soon be entering the “endemic” phase.
The endemic phase of a viral infection is that it no longer causes the terrible hospitalizations of the pandemic phase and that we have enough immunized population, so its levels remain low.
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“This is a challenging period,” California Governor Newsom said during a recent news conference. “We’re going to get through this. Just a few more weeks.”
Experts, however, warn that the variant’s unpredictability makes setting timelines difficult.
“We’re still away” from COVID-19 reaching endemicity, said Dr. Catherine Smallwood, a COVID-19 incident manager at the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme.
Exhausted by the two years of the pandemic, many people wonder what life will look like when we reach endemicity.
“We will probably not be masking, distancing, contact tracing, doing asymptomatic testing,” said Dr. Monica Gandhi, a specialist of infectious disease at the University of California, San Francisco.
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Dr. Gandhi says, “It will be managed more like influenza, that is vaccines, treatment and recommending masks for the vulnerable indoors.”
She added the high transmission rates of the omicron variant could push the pandemic into endemicity.
“There are an incredible number of cases in both unvaccinated and vaccinated. What this does is it exposes you to the complete virus, and in turn, you develop antibodies, T and B cells across the entire virus,” explained Dr. Gandhi.
As the omicron surge is monitored around the world, data from samples of wastewater indicates omicron is declining.
A study in Boston shows a 40 percent decrease of COVID in its wastewaters. So this means COVID is going down, then when it comes down, it will come down quickly.
