The Covid-19 endemic does not mean ‘back to normal’.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Everyone expects the Covid-19 pandemic to end up being endemic. Some parties consider the sign of the final phase of the pandemic to be in sight following the emergence of varian omicron which is said to make SARS-CoV-2 more contagious but only causes mild infections.
The transition to endemic is a good sign, but there are still some important factors to watch out for. Experts warn that the endemic is not as simple as many think.
Endemic is not the same as “back to normal” aka back to life until 2019. So what exactly is meant by ‘endemic’?
As defined by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), endemic refers to the constant state of a disease and/or the prevalent prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area.
The level of endemic disease in an area is basically the basic level of the incidence of a disease in a particular area. However, that is not necessarily the desired level. The CDC explains, a disease can be considered endemic, but still has a fairly broad meaning.
“An endemic disease is an infection that is always present in a certain population,” Vincent Hsu, executive director of infection control at AdventHealth, told HuffPost, quoted Tuesday (25/1/2022).
According to Hsu, the disease may only be found limited to certain geographic areas, such as malaria. However, it can also be a widespread infection that has a seasonal pattern, such as influenza, or continues throughout the year causing generally mild illness, such as common cold aka the common cold (cold).
It is difficult to know exactly when the transition from pandemic to endemic will occur. Health officials and epidemiologists may have different thresholds for determining when Covid-19 can be termed a common disease that is predictable and does not create disruption when people live with it.
“In practical terms, for Covid-19 to be endemic, we need to be at a point where Covid-19 is common enough that it doesn’t cause severe illness that results in hospitalization and death,” said Jay Lee, a family doctor in Costa Mesa, California, US. Union.
In other words, we need a sufficiently high level of community immunity against Covid-19 so that hospitalization and death rates are not as high as they are now. Lee said that the current surge in Covid-19 cases was like the 10th round of a heavyweight boxing match.
“And we’re dealing with a series of blows that we’ve never seen before,” said Lee.
Endemic disease is not necessarily the same as mild disease
As the virus continues to infect relatively large numbers of people, it has more opportunities to change its genome. The flu, for example.
Most people who get the flu will recover within a few weeks. However, the flu can also be deadly for some people. Sometimes, flu pandemics also occur, when the disease spreads from one person to another in an efficient and sustainable manner.
“What we see with influenza are the decades between major pandemics, and major pandemics caused by changing segments of the flu virus genome, known as genetic drift,” said infectious disease expert Stuart Ray, who is also vice chair of medicine for data integrity at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
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