Is the coronavirus pandemic about to become an endemic? Some scientists are saying yes, COVID-19 is here to stay for good.
As the world enters its third straight year of COVID, researchers suggest we might just want to get used to dealing with the virus instead of hoping for it to go away.
"Everyone has stopped talking about getting rid of COVID," Elizabeth Halloran, an epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, told NBC. "It's not going away, and that means it's going to be endemic."
The medical community expects the coronavirus to become like many other viruses, such as the flu and cold, that circulate around the population for the foreseeable future. What has yet to be determined, however, is if the coronavirus will continue to pose a greater health risk than other viruses.
"The really open question for me — or maybe for public health or all of us — is when it becomes endemic and people become infected, how much severe disease and death does it cause," Halloran said.
Mutations like Omicron and Delta variants show just how unpredictable the coronavirus really is. When a virus is constantly changing and evolving, it's hard for scientists to stay in front of it and protect the community.
Federal health officials, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, have suggested COVID precautions like wearing masks should be permanent in certain situations -- at least for now.
"We want to make sure people keep their masks on. I think the idea of taking masks off, in my mind, is really not something we should even be considering," Fauci told ABC.
Dr. Francis Riedo, an infectious disease physician at EvergreenHealth hospital system in Kirkland, Washington, believes that COVID is going to be so pervasive, everyone will catch it at some point.
"It seems to me it's almost inevitable you're going to become infected," Riedo told NBC. "The real question is how severe that infection is going to be."
A disease is an endemic when it is constantly present in a population but limited to a particular region, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pfizer executives believe COVID will become an endemic by 2024. The company's chief scientific officer said some regions will experience the transition from pandemic to endemic earlier than others.
"When and how exactly this happens will depend on the evolution of the disease, how effectively society deploys vaccines and treatments, and equitable distribution to places where vaccination rates are low," Mikael Dolsten said during an investors call. "It seems like over the next year or two, some regions will transition to an endemic model while other regions will continue in pandemic mode."
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