"COVID-19: endemic doesn't mean harmless"

[Nevilledog]

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Prof. Jose-Luis Jimenez
@jljcolorado
1/ @Nature: "COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmless"

"The word ‘endemic’ has become one of the most misused of the pandemic. And many of the errant assumptions made encourage a misplaced complacency."

By @ArisKatzourakis

https://nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00155-x…
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1:22 PM · Jan 24, 2022

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00155-x

The word ‘endemic’ has become one of the most misused of the pandemic. And many of the errant assumptions made encourage a misplaced complacency. It doesn’t mean that COVID-19 will come to a natural end.

To an epidemiologist, an endemic infection is one in which overall rates are static — not rising, not falling. More precisely, it means that the proportion of people who can get sick balances out the ‘basic reproduction number’ of the virus, the number of individuals that an infected individual would infect, assuming a population in which everyone could get sick. Yes, common colds are endemic. So are Lassa fever, malaria and polio. So was smallpox, until vaccines stamped it out.

In other words, a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 people in 2020. Ten million fell ill with tuberculosis that same year and 1.5 million died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’.

As an evolutionary virologist, it frustrates me when policymakers invoke the word endemic as an excuse to do little or nothing. There’s more to global health policy than learning to live with endemic rotavirus, hepatitis C or measles.

*snip*

[roamer65]

1. Completely correct.

Especially if a promiscuous virus like SARS-CoV-2 is hopping back and forth between mammalian species, including humans. If this is the case, endemic becomes a meaningless label.

[Tomconroy]

2. We seem to be doing everything he suggests.

[SoCalDavidS]

3. We're Not Going To Reach Endemic Stage For Quite Awhile, If Ever nt

[Shermann]

4. The word "safely" is the most misused

We're going to have unnecessary rallies, and we're going to do it safely.
We're going to open schools without mask mandates, and we're going to do it safely.
We're going to cram into churches and sing, and we're going to do it safely.

Just state whatever it is you want to do and bolt "safely" on to rationalize it.

[Hugin]

5. Polio was endemic until it wasn't.

Small Pox... Mumps... Measles... Cholera... You name it.

Somehow, endemic has been conflated with harmless.