As more and more countries ease Covid restrictions and prepare to “live with the virus,” experts warn Covid-19 will remain a permanent fixture in our lives and could still cause widespread and serious disease
, possibly even giving rise to another coronavirus pandemic in the future.Endemicity “is a pattern, not an intrinsic trait of a virus,” Dr. Aris Katzourakis, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Oxford, toldWorrisome mutations in “endemic strains can certainly seed new” outbreaks and potentially new pandemics, he explains.
Animals could be a potential source of these new coronaviruses with “pandemic potential,” Dr. Elizabeth Halloran, an epidemiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, toldpointing to the family of influenza viruses able to “recombine in other animal hosts” and then spread between humans.it is premature
to treat Covid as an endemic disease at the moment—which broadly means a stable and predictable number of infections—and worry the word is being mistakenly or misleadingly used to paint an overly optimistic picture of what life after the pandemic might look like. “There is a misconception that endemicity is just a natural endpoint… that the disease will, on its own, become a minimal health burden,” Katzourakis says.
The virus will still need to be carefully managed to mitigate its impact on public health and Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert at the University of California at Berkeley, toldthe term endemic “says nothing about how much disease [there is] or how severe the disease may be.” Endemic infectious diseases can become epidemic and pandemic and vice versa,” says Swartzberg. How likely another Covid pandemic is.
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