India has witnessed a steep decline in the number of daily Covid-19 cases. This has led to a curb-free environment almost everywhere. People have already become complacent with the necessary precautions like wearing masks and sanitizing as much as possible. If this is the case now, what happens if Covid-19 is declared endemic in future? Does it mean, people can fully get rid of their masks or won’t be required to maintain social distance anymore? Will the world completely return back to normalcy?
Well, according to a World Health Oraganisation expert, we need to be careful with the term ‘endemic’.
Public Health Specialist and Executive Director of Health Emergencies Programme at WHO, Dr. Mike Ryan, recently said that even if Covid-19 becomes endemic, it will remain important to reduce infections, suffering, and death.
“I think we need to be careful here in terms of the word endemic. Endemic means that the virus is present and transmitting at lower levels, usually with some form of seasonal transmission or increases that are seasonal or outbreaks on top of an endemic situation. That’s very classic for many infectious diseases, but remember endemic HIV and endemic tuberculosis and endemic malaria kill millions of people on this planet every year. so please don’t equate endemic with equals good,” Ryan said.
He further added that changing the status of a pandemic to endemic, is just changing the label and it doesn’t change the challenge we face. “We need sustained control on this virus. We need sustained protection of our most vulnerable. We need strong health systems to deal with those infections we can’t prevent, and we need to be able to continue to do that with levels of infection we experience,” he said.
According to an IE report, a disease becoming endemic does not mean it is harmless. In an editorial in Nature, Oxford University professor on viral evolution Dr Aris Katzourakis had stated that a disease can be endemic and both widespread and deadly. “Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to normal,” he said.
