Earlier this year, vaccines and easing restrictions seemed to indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic was almost over, but a new surge of cases dashed hopes. So, when will it actually be over?
“Even among the scientific community, you would get really different answers,” said Rachael Piltch-Loeb, a researcher and fellow with the Emergency Preparedness Research, Evaluation & Practice Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, according to National Geographic. “There is no one definition of what the end of a pandemic means.”
Listen to your favorite News/Talk station now on Audacy.
Before COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic in March 2020, most of us weren’t sure what the start of a pandemic looked like either. After months of lockdowns, mitigations and restrictions, many in the U.S. were ready to let go of the pandemic altogether this summer, attending parties and large-scale events.
However, the highly infectious Delta variant of the virus started causing case surges, especially among the unvaccinated.
“Until this [virus] is controlled or more limited globally, it’s not going away,” Piltch-Loeb said.
How have pandemics ended in the past?
Once the worldwide spread of a pandemic disease is under control in a localized area, it is reclassified as an epidemic, per World Health Organization (WHO) standards. Bringing down numbers to “expected or normal levels” globally is one way the COVID-19 could be scaled down from pandemic status.
By then, COVID would circulate as an endemic virus, similar to how the 1918 flu mutated into the modern seasonal flu. Only two diseases have ever been fully eradicated, according to National Geographic: smallpox and rinderpest. To do this aggressive vaccination campaigns were implemented.
Diseases “retreat to their animal reservoirs, or they mutate at low levels,” said Joshua Epstein, professor of epidemiology in the New York University School of Global Public Health and founding director of its Agent-Based Modeling Laboratory. “But they don’t typically literally disappear from the global biome.”
In fact, most causes of past pandemics are still with us at low levels today, including the bubonic plague, said National Geographic. Changes in hygiene and antibiotics help keep these pathogens at bay.
Related
How does this apply to COVID-19?
As with the 1918 flu, COVID-19 is expected to continue mutating and the human immune system should eventually adapt to fight it off without vaccines, said Saad Omer, an epidemiologist and director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
However, vaccines accelerate the process and prevent deaths that would result from pure herd immunity.
“Developing immunity the hard way is not a solution that we should be aspiring to,” Omer says.
Last week, WHO Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the organization is aiming to vaccinate at least 10 percent of each country’s population by September and to increase that to 70 percent by mid-2022.
As of August 6, only 28 percent of the world was vaccinated against COVID-19, according to National Geographic. Most vaccines have been distributed in wealthy countries, said the WHO. Even in those countries, hesitancy and misinformation has slowed vaccination rates.
While vaccination rates remain spotty, the virus has mutated into dangerous strains and infections have increased.
“Sometimes we take two steps forward and one step back,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Related
How do we want it to end?
In the case of the 1918 flu, which coincided with World War I, the public pushed forward into “The Roaring Twenties” despite the fact that the virus was still circulating in the U.S., said Naomi Rogers, professor of the history of medicine and of history at Yale University.
The reality is, ending a pandemic before science backs it up will result in deaths, according to National Geographic. Vaccines should be able to ease us into endemic numbers.
“If we can bring the death count down to a certain level and resume our lives normally, one could say the pandemic has ‘ended’,” explained Jagpreet Chhatwal, a decision scientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Institute for Technology Assessment in Boston.
For example, the endemic flu claims 12,000 and 61,000 people in the U.S. each year, based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.
Last year, COVID-19 caused approximately 375,000 deaths in the U.S. and between Jan. 1 and July 21, another 600,000 people in the country died from the virus. Globally, the pandemic has claimed more than 4 million lives, according to the WHO.
Related
LISTEN on the Audacy App
Sign Up and Follow Audacy
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram