{"id":2829,"date":"2023-03-14T15:32:43","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T20:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=2829"},"modified":"2023-03-14T15:32:47","modified_gmt":"2023-03-14T20:32:47","slug":"is-the-covid-19-pandemic-over-heres-why-the-answer-is-political-social-scientific-and-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/03\/14\/is-the-covid-19-pandemic-over-heres-why-the-answer-is-political-social-scientific-and-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the COVID-19 pandemic over? Here\u2019s why the answer is political, social, scientific, and complex<\/a>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Fast Company<\/a> The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic three years ago today, but experts disagree about how and when pandemics end.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been three years since the World Health Organization declared<\/a> COVID-19 a pandemic. So we know when the pandemic officially began. But what must happen for it to officially end? Who even makes the call?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s where things get a bit mushy. The WHO made its declaration on March 11, 2020<\/a>, after 118,000 cases in 114 countries and 4,291 deaths. A pandemic is a sort of \u201cepidemic plus,\u201d an infectious disease that spreads over a really large region. It could be worldwide or just a continent. The last time we saw a major global pandemic was the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 50 million people, although there have been other pandemics since, including the 1968 flu pandemic and the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. Some experts would consider HIV and tuberculosis to be pandemics, too, but it depends on whom you\u2019re asking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marking the end of a pandemic is complex, says Marion Dorsey, an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire who studies pandemics. It\u2019s political, social, and scientific, and each is influencing the other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no one body who is going to say definitively that this is over,\u201d Dorsey says. \u201cIt\u2019s not like a war where you can say, at 11:11 a.m. on November 11, that is the armistice and we all agree. It\u2019s not going to be that clean.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you ask John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History<\/em><\/a>, a pandemic ends when people stop paying attention to it. He says it looks like society is willing to accept between 125,000 and 150,000 deaths a year as long as they\u2019re almost all among the elderly or the frail. By comparison, influenza deaths range from 10,000 to 50,000.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt has almost nothing to do with the virus or the death toll,\u201d Barry says. \u201cIt\u2019s over when people decide it\u2019s over and return to normal patterns of living, which we seem to have done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Americans are split when asked whether the pandemic is over: 49% say it\u2019s over, while 51% say it isn\u2019t, according to a March Gallup Poll<\/a>. Much of the mindset in the public arena has centered on where you fall politically<\/a>. The White House has also oscillated over whether we still call COVID-19 a pandemic<\/a>, and earlier this year, Republicans introduced a \u201cPandemic Is Over\u201d Act<\/a>, claiming that President Joe Biden\u2019s extension of $10 billion in COVID funding was unwarranted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FOLLOWING THE SCIENCE BUT LOSING THE PLOT<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The discussion in the scientific community has been far more nuanced, albeit equally divided. The WHO\u2019s emergency committee meets every three months to assess the situation. In January, it acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic may be approaching an inflection point, but noted that the virus \u201cretains an ability to evolve into new variants with unpredictable characteristics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next meeting is in April, and that expert committee would be the one to make a decision whether to declare the public health emergency over. But it\u2019s highly unlikely it will end then, says WHO spokesman Daniel Epstein. At least 10,000 people die each week, and a few weeks ago, that number was 40,000. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are still in a public health emergency of international concern and a pandemic,\u201d says Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO\u2019s lead on COVID-19. \u201cThe virus has not settled into a predictable pattern. We do not have seasonality. As governments, we cannot let down our guard.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week, noted epidemiologist Eric Topol suggested that the pandemic was over in his March 4 blog post<\/a>, which lays out evidence that COVID-19 has entered the \u201cendemic\u201d stage, indicating it will always be with us.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been dealing with Omicron since November 2021,\u201d writes Topol, who is founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a professor of molecular medicine at the Scripps Research Institute. It\u2019s hard to imagine how further mutations to Omicron will pose a major threat, he says, because we have three years of infections, vaccination, and boosters that combined can fight off major waves of the virus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. may not see big surges of cases and adverse outcomes, Topol writes, unless there is a hyper-accelerated evolution of the virus within an immunocompromised host, or it\u2019s a new family of viruses antigenically distant from our immune recognition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fellow scientists viewed his post as a declaration that the pandemic is indeed dead and turned to news organizations<\/a> and Twitter<\/a> to share the news. The virus, they say, has reached the endemic<\/a> phase, which means it sticks around and acts more like the flu. But currently, there\u2019s no \u201cCOVID season\u201d as there is a flu season.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luke O\u2019Neill, a biochemistry professor at Trinity College Dublin, told Ireland\u2019s NewsTalk radio station that many scientists already felt the pandemic was over. \u201cIn the old days, say with the 1918 pandemic, it\u2019s over when you say it\u2019s over.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not everyone is ready to call it just yet. \u201cI\u2019d say the pandemic is in a new phase but it\u2019s not over,\u201d says Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fewer people report cases with home testing, we\u2019re seeing fewer surges, and in healthy people the cases are milder than three years ago. Still, 300 people still die in the U.S. each day from COVID-19. \u201cIt\u2019s not a small number,\u201d Dowdy says. \u201cIt is still a very big problem, maybe not the No. 1 health problem in our country now, but it\u2019s still in the top 10.\u201d<\/p>\nXLRWUsu JIGmJ pPPM ESUb<\/a><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fast Company The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic three years ago today, but experts disagree about how and when pandemics end. It\u2019s been three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. So we know when the pandemic officially began. But what must happen for it to officially end? Who even makes the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":false,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychological-and-sociological-impact"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2829"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2830,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2829\/revisions\/2830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}