NPR: Is COVID Endemic Yet? Yep, Says CDC. Here's What That Means (Others Not So Sure)

NPR, Aug. 8, 2024. Edit.

Four years after SARS-CoV2 sparked a devastating global pandemic, U.S. health officials now consider COVID-19 an endemic disease. "At this point, COVID-19 can be described as endemic throughout the world," Aron Hall, the deputy director for science at the CDC's coronavirus and other respiratory viruses division, told NPR in an interview.

That means, essentially, that COVID is here to stay in predictable ways.

The classification doesn't change any official recommendations or guidelines for how people should respond to the virus. But the categorization does acknowledge that the SARS-CoV2 virus that causes COVID will continue to circulate and cause illness indefinitely, underscoring the importance of people getting vaccinated and taking other steps to reduce their risk for the foreseeable future.

It is still a very significant problem, but one that can now be managed against the backdrop of many public health threats and not as sort of a singular pandemic threat,” Hall says. “And so how we approach COVID-19 is very similar to how we approach other endemic diseases." A fuzzy definition. Ever since the coronavirus exploded around the globe, officials have been referring to COVID as a “pandemic,” which occurs when a dangerous new disease is spreading widely in different countries.

The definition of “endemic” is fuzzier, but generally refers to a disease that’s become entrenched in places, like malaria is in many parts of Central and South America and sub-Saharan Africa, forcing people to learn how to live with it. And even though COVID is still spreading widely, daily life has returned to normal for most people, even during this summer's wave of infections.. COVID seems to be becoming a normal part of life. So NPR reached out to the CDC and other experts to find out if they think the time had come to start referring to COVID as endemic.. But not everyone agrees...
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/08/09/nx-s1-5060398/covid-endemic-cdc-summer-surge