(Anderson) Herald Bulletin
Most health experts seem to agree that the country may be moving out of the pandemic phase of COVID-19 and into the endemic phase.
What that means for the average American is that living with COVID-19 may become the new normal.
That’s not all bad. An endemic virus, such as the common flu, follows a predictable pattern and causes minimal disruption to everyday life. It is regularly recurring and carries a low risk of severe illness or death.
An epidemic, on the other hand, is a sudden and sharp increase in the spread of a disease. An epidemic becomes a pandemic when the disease begins to spread on a global scale.
For COVID-19 to be considered endemic, scientists must first determine what would be an acceptable level of transmission.
A sign that we are moving in this direction is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently updated its guidelines to track hospitalizations due to COVID-19.
These guidelines aim to track cases of severe illness caused by the virus rather than just charting how far the virus has spread.
Dr. Stephen Parodi, an infectious disease expert practicing in Oakland, California, commented on the future of the virus in a recent article for the American Medical Association.
“We can move this in a way that the disease is milder,” he said. “At least so far, vaccine-based immunity appears to provide very broad-based immunity against multiples of variants.”
While scientists continue their research, the rest of us can look forward to going about our normal lives – with a few modifications.
Since we’ve not yet reached endemic status, predicting the patterns of the virus is still a work in progress, so don’t throw away those masks just yet. You may need them when COVID-19 season comes around.
Just as we stock up on tissues and cough syrup during cold and flu season, we might find ourselves in the near future stocking up on masks and making social-distancing plans when the time of year approaches that COVID-19 cases will be on the rise.
COVID-19 boosters might become as commonplace as the annual flu shots. And keep those masks at the ready.
