The coronavirus will be with us forever. But we still have no idea what happens next.
Source: Endemicity Is Meaningless
Not a cheery read. Imagine the trucker honklers if we get a big spike in fall/winter 2022.
“Endemicity neither ensures a permanent détente nor promises a return “to 2019,” Abraar Karan, an infectious-disease physician and global-health expert at Stanford, told us. Its only true dictate—and even this one’s shaky, depending on whom you ask—is a modicum of predictability in the average number of people who catch and pass on a pathogen over a set period of time.”
“Flu is one of many examples that show why endemic can’t be thought of as the inverse of pandemic; the two terms are not opposite ends of a spectrum. Endemic doesn’t mean the virus is “suddenly not going to hurt us,” Murray said.”
“Using the term endemic imposes a false sense of certainty on a fundamentally uncertain situation. “Everybody wants it to be simplified, but there is so much that we don’t understand yet,” Lakdawala told us. “We’re trying to cram it all into one word, and one word doesn’t cut it.””
