COVID has been upgraded — or downgraded — depending on how you look at it.
After more than four years since SARS-CoV-2 caused a savage global pandemic, U.S. health officials now consider COVID-19 to be an endemic disease.
Aaron Hall, deputy director for science at the CDC’s coronavirus and other respiratory viruses division, has said, “At this point, COVID-19 can be described as endemic throughout the world.”
That means that COVID is here to stay in seemingly predictable ways.
The classification doesn’t alter any official recommendations or guidelines for how people should respond to the virus. It does, however, recognize that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, will continue to spread and cause illness indefinitely.
“It is still a very significant problem, but one that can now be managed against the backdrop of many public health threats and not as sort of a singular pandemic threat,” Hall says. “And so how we approach COVID-19 is very similar to how we approach other endemic diseases.”
Since the global outbreak of the coronavirus, officials have been referring to COVID as a “pandemic,” which occurs when a new infectious disease spreads widely across different countries.
“Endemic” generally refers to a disease that’s become deeply established in a place, like the flu, forcing people to learn how to live with it. In the case of COVID, this means that the virus will likely continue to circulate in the population, causing periodic outbreaks, but at a more manageable level than during a pandemic.
Still, despite the virus spreading widely, daily life has returned to normal for most people, even during this summer’s wave of infections. It is becoming a normal part of life.
Not everyone agrees with this assessment, though. Some epidemiologists believe that COVID may be on the path to becoming endemic, but they caution that the virus is still too unpredictable to reach a definitive conclusion. For instance, the surge of cases this summer started surprisingly early and turned out to be significantly larger than anticipated.
The latest data from the CDC shows high or very high levels of the virus in wastewater in almost every state.
“There’s still a lot of unpredictability with this virus,” says Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist who writes the well-known newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist. “And a lot of scientists, including myself, think it’s going to take at least a decade for SARS-CoV2 to really find this really predictable pattern. I hope that, over time, that it will fade into the background. But we’re just not there yet.”
Hall and Jha agree that COVID remains somewhat unpredictable but argue it’s become predictable enough to be considered endemic.
“The best way to describe COVID right now is as endemic but with these periodic epidemics,” Hall says. “And those epidemics can vary in terms of their timing and magnitude. And that’s exactly why ongoing vigilance and surveillance is critical.”
William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, warns that whether COVID is endemic or not, it will remain a significant problem.
“Endemic doesn’t necessarily mean good,” he admonishes.
He argues that tuberculosis and malaria are endemic in some parts of the world, and “neither of those are good things.”
The virus is still claiming the lives of hundreds of people every week, especially older individuals and those with underlying health conditions. According to a new CDC report, COVID-19 is no longer the third-leading cause of death, but it still holds the rank of the 10th top cause of death. The report projects that COVID-19 will continue to cause close to 50,000 deaths annually.
It’s crucial to continue monitoring the virus’s spread and evolution, especially to detect the emergence of any new, more dangerous variants.
All of this is to say, unfortunately, COVID isn’t going anywhere.
Sources:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/covid-endemic-bill-hanage/
https://www.lung.org/blog/epidemic-pandemic-endemic-covid
https://www.cdc.gov/nwss/rv/COVID19-currentlevels.html
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/10.1001/jama.2024.15563