![]() ![]() That’s partly because endemicity isn’t just about getting the virus’s reproductive number down to one. “That is really the million-dollar question,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told me. Here’s one big question you’d probably like the answer to: Does omicron push endemicity farther off into the future? Or could it actually speed up our path to endemicity by infecting so much of the population so swiftly that we more quickly develop a layer of natural immunity? When we’ll know we’re finally in “endemic” territory So how should you be thinking about the trajectory and timeline of the pandemic going into the new year? And how should omicron be shaping your everyday decision-making and risk calculus? In the fall, some health experts were saying that they thought the delta variant might represent the last big act for this pandemic, and that we could reach endemicity in 2022. Looking at this data might make you wonder about some of the predictions that were floating around before omicron came on the scene. Nobody can look at the following chart and reasonably conclude that we’re in endemic territory. The highly contagious omicron variant means each infected person is infecting more than one other person, with the result that cases are exploding across the globe. ![]() ![]() “That means one infected person, on average, infects one other person.” “A disease is endemic if the reproductive number is stably at one,” Boston University epidemiologist Eleanor Murray explained. We’re not going to totally eradicate Covid-19, but we will see it move out of the pandemic phase and into the endemic phase.Įndemicity means the virus will keep circulating in parts of the global population for years, but its prevalence and impact will come down to relatively manageable levels, so it ends up more like the flu than a world-stopping disease.įor an infectious disease to be classed in the endemic phase, the rate of infections has to more or less stabilize across years, rather than showing big, unexpected spikes as Covid-19 has been doing. With omicron rates soaring, you may find yourself despairingly asking when - or even if - this pandemic is ever going to end. ![]()
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