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Nearly two years after the start of the COVID pandemic, some countries have indicated their intention to start treating COVID-19 like other endemic diseases, such as seasonal flu.
Despite the relatively high rates of infection in the frantic spread of the Omicron variant, it seems to cause a less serious disease but which is highly transmissible according to initial research, including countries in England and Ireland that have severely curtailed public life restrictions.
Denmark has announced plans to lift all restrictions next week, as its health ministry has announced that it will not longer to be considered dangerous to society. ‘
Official messages from political leaders in Spain, the United Kingdom and elsewhere have stressed that societies need to learn to live with the virus.
“COVID will not go away. It will be with us for many, many years to come, perhaps forever, and we need to learn to live with it,” said Sajid Javid, the UK’s health minister, last week.
“I believe that we are leading Europe in the transition from pandemic to endemic and that we are working to show the world how you can live with COVID.”
However, officials from the World Health Organization have warned that it is too early to treat COVID-19 as an endemic disease, stressing the questionable evolution of the virus and stressing that the global pandemic continues to be angry.
“We still have a great deal of uncertainty and a rapidly evolving virus that sets new challenges. We are certainly not at the point where we are able to call it endemic,” Catherine Smallwood, WHO’s chief European emergency officer, told a news conference.
The Omicron variant continues to cause an increase in infection, which has increased the pressure on public health systems. According to the WHO, there are 21 million new cases of coronavirus were it was reported worldwide last week that there has been the highest number of infections per week since the pandemic began. Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) he said on Wednesday, the U.S. region had the highest number of infections since the pandemic began, with more than eight million new cases.
Meanwhile, a large part of the world’s population has not been fully vaccinated against COVID, increasing their chances of developing more serious diseases among them. Low vaccination rates in many countries are also likely to lead to a new variant, which may lead to attempts to treat COVID as endemic.
What does endemic mean?
United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines endemic “as the constant presence and / or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population of a geographical area.”
Dr. Ebere Okereke, senior technical advisor at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change and honorary advisor to the CDC’s Africa Public Health, said one of the key factors is “predictability and stability”.
“In public health [during endemicity] we have a number of cases expected and anticipated in a geographical region over a period of time. ‘
Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergency program, recently stated: “Endemic does not mean ‘good’ in itself. Endemic means ‘forever here’.”
An epidemic is defined as a disease that affects a large number of people in a community, population, and region. A pandemic is an epidemic that has spread to many countries or continents.
When authorities decide to treat a disease as endemic, it sometimes affects the measures that were put in place before the pandemic phase.
“If something is a pandemic or an epidemic, we need to take some precautionary measures against it to limit its spread. And with endemism, these measures are not necessary or necessary, “said Dr. Anna Blakney, an assistant professor at Michael Smith Laboratories and the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia.
In the case of COVID, Blakney said that this means that the government means “less control over restrictions, tests, masks, or measures that have been shown to work against COVID.”
Does COVID-19 lead to an endemic disease?
Any potential transition would vary from country to country, depending on a number of factors, such as the extent of the disease at national borders and the level of immunity within the population.
According to the United Nations, two out of three people have been vaccinated with at least one dose in high-income countries. In low-income countries, one in nine people have been vaccinated with at least one dose since January 19th.
“That’s when you say a disease [has] it has gone from epidemic to endemic, there are no hard and fast rules to determine that, ”Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Al Jazeera.
However, he said it could be a mark when you don’t see the disease weakening your hospital capacity.
“When COVID-19 loses that ability through enough immunity … I think the world will become endemic, but it will be in different time periods depending on where you are,” he added.
According to Adalja, endemism is unavoidable in the case of COVID.
“I believe that from the first day of the COVID-19 pandemic, it would always be possible for it to become an endemic respiratory virus,” Adalja said.
He added that the main priority is to get more tools to help reduce the strain on hospitals and healthcare systems, including vaccines, antivirals and monoclonal antibodies.
“Omicron has accelerated this process … we are basically at the peak of endemism and it is possible that once Omicron’s rise surpasses the countries of the world, we will clearly be in an endemic phase,” Adalja added.
How far has the world gone from the pandemic phase?
WHO Director-General Hans Kluge said on Sunday that the Omicron strain had taken Europe into another phase of the pandemic.
“The region is likely to go to a pandemic end-to-end match,” Klug said in an interview with AFP news, adding that Omicron could infect 60 percent of Europeans by March.
He said Europe could expect global immunity in the coming months as a result of the current wave of vaccines or infection.
“We anticipate that there will be a period of calm before Covid-19 returns towards the end of the year, but there is no need for a pandemic to return,” Klug said.
But the next day, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus appeared to throw out Kluge’s comments.
“It’s dangerous that Omicron will be the last variant, or that we’re in the final game … the world-wide conditions are right for more variants to appear,” he said.
Okerek shares a similar view, noting that the world lacks the knowledge about coronavirus needed to predict the behavior of new strains and to become endemic.
“I don’t think we know enough about SARS-Cov-2 if a new variant is created to say that it will behave that way or to say that no new variants will appear, we don’t know,” Okerek said.
“The key to reducing the emergence of new variants is to ensure that we optimize vaccination programs worldwide.
“Until we do that, we run the risk of new variants, the behavior of which we cannot predict today,” he added.
They have vaccination rates against COVID-19 remained low in Africaabout 8 percent of the continent’s population is fully vaccinated against the disease.
“In Africa.
Experts have warned that there is still not enough information to know exactly what is coming next, especially with new strains.
“If the virus starts to become a lighter virus, we would be fine,” Blakney said. “But if it suddenly becomes really contagious and deadly, we’re not going to be in the right place.”
What do the first data on the Omicron variant tell us about the pandemic?
Omicron was first discovered in South Africa in late November and initial research has found that the strain is highly transmissible. Symptoms of infection it appears to be more severe than in other variants, while initial studies indicate that it appears to be symptoms experienced by vaccinated patients. smoother than among the uninserted.
Its high transmissibility has also proved to be a challenge. It has its spread it caused considerable tension in health systems, many countries are struggling with the arrival of patients.
“Omicron is so widespread that we are still seeing an increase in hospitalizations and deaths,” Blakney said.
The current situation “tells us that we need to keep a watch while there is a significant transmission and the risk of new variants appearing,” Okerek said.
“It simply came to our notice then that our vaccines were not the perfect solution.
“But the Omicron variant also shows us that we can’t lower our guard, we need to continue to improve the tools we have in our portfolio to manage this pandemic,” he added.
How can the world get out of the pandemic?
There is a consensus among most health experts that one way to end this pandemic is to make vaccines and treatments available worldwide.
“Vaccinations are key,” Blakney said.
“We need to keep getting new vaccines, and understand how long that immunity lasts. We also need to increase the production of all the tools we have, anti-virus, testing, monoclonal antibodies, and make them available.
“We have the tools, it’s just to make it available to people all over the world,” he added.
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