Endemic itself is not a permanent state. The same virus can be epidemic or pandemic, and that depends on how immune people are. So this lazy assumption that we will reach a stable place is not good for us. We need to continue thinking about things like mask wearing, distancing, air ventia, infiltration. These things don't just go away because avirus has become endemic. Instead, what they do is they determine the balance of that endimacity.
The word endemic is often mistakenly used to describe a rosy end to the pandemic where COVID-19 becomes a mild, but ever-present infection akin to the common cold. But this is by no means guaranteed and the reality could be much less favourable. In this episode of Coronapod we get the evolutionary virologist's take - asking what endemicity might really look like, and what control we still have in shaping the future of SARS-CoV-2.World View: COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmlessSubscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.
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