Public policy (not the coronavirus) should shape what endemic means

Abstract

In January 2021, almost one year into the pandemic, a survey of more than 100 immunologists, infectious disease researchers, and virologists working on COVID-19 revealed that most – 90 percent of respondents – forecasted that the disease is likely to become endemic as it will not be eradicated [1]. They expected it to exist in certain areas of the world for years to come, despite it being virtually eliminated in other regions, as the populations there acquire some degree of herd immunity through the combined effects of vaccination and infection. Katzourakis [2] noted that “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” [2].