World Health Organization (WHO) officials warned Thursday that COVID-19 is far from becoming endemic, noting that the virus is still capable of causing “major epidemics.” “We are still in the midst of this pandemic, we all wish we weren’t, but we are not at an endemic stage,” said the head of the fight against COVID-19 for the WHO, Maria Van Kerkhove, in a question-and-answer session on social networks.
“I don’t think we’re close to an endemic situation with this virus,” said Michael Ryan, the WHO’s emergency manager, for his part. “It’s not yet fully following a temporal cadence or a seasonal pattern,” he said during the session.
“It’s still capable of causing large epidemics as we’ve seen, and even in populations that have been previously exposed,” he said. stressing that when a disease becomes endemic it does not mean the disease is not serious.
“Tuberculosis is endemic, malaria is endemic, yet they kill millions of people every year. Please don’t think that endemic means ‘it’s over’ and ‘it’s benign,'” he insisted, explaining that once certain diseases become endemic, they tend to become childhood diseases.
But if immunization levels in the population decline – as they have for measles – “we see epidemics start up again because the population’s protection levels drop,” the WHO official observed.
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