As we enter the fourth 12 months of residing with COVID, we’re all asking the predictable query: when will the pandemic be over?
To reply this query, it’s price reminding ourselves {that a} pandemic entails the worldwide unfold of a illness that requires an emergency response at a worldwide degree.
This week, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared COVID continues to be a public well being emergency of worldwide concern.
As Ghebreyesus notes, we nonetheless face vital challenges, with excessive charges of transmission in lots of nations, the chance of a game-changing new variant ever-present, and an unknown affect of lengthy COVID.
Despite restricted testing, we’re nonetheless seeing giant numbers of confirmed circumstances.
Our World in Data/Johns Hopkins University CSSE COVID-19 Data, CC BY
Yet COVID pandemic “fatigue” means it’s more durable to succeed in folks with public well being messaging, whereas misinformation continues to flow into. In addition, many nations have deprioritised COVID testing and surveillance, so we don’t have correct knowledge concerning the extent of transmission.
But whereas we’re nonetheless within the emergency part of our COVID response, three years after the unique declaration, the WHO additionally acknowledged we’re at a transition level. This means we’re transferring in the direction of the “illness management” part of our response to COVID and studying to reside with the virus.
What are we transitioning to?
Moving out of the emergency response part for COVID doesn’t imply ignoring COVID or returning to precisely what our lives seemed like earlier than March 2020. Rather, we have to be taught to coexist with COVID.
Living with COVID means making use of applicable prevention and management measures for COVID as we go about our lives. This is what we do for different infectious illnesses, together with different respiratory illnesses.
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We’re coming into a brand new part of COVID, the place we every must assess and mitigate our personal danger. But how?
The only factor we are able to do to cut back the chance of COVID is to be up-to-date with our vaccinations and boosters. COVID vaccines don’t utterly cease transmission, however they enormously scale back your chance of turning into severely ailing.
We may also scale back the chance of spreading COVID by masking up in high-risk settings, socialising in well-ventilated areas, and staying away from others when unwell.
Living with COVID additionally entails authorities persevering with with public well being actions to watch illness transmission and to stop, management and reply to infections.
What has prompted the transition?
We’ve entered the transition part as a result of the chance related to COVID has shifted. Thanks to protected and efficient vaccines, together with excessive ranges of prior an infection, we now have elevated immunity on the inhabitants degree and COVID an infection is much less more likely to result in extreme illness.
This, mixed with the emergence of much less virulent variants (for now) and the addition to our armoury of quite a few efficient therapy choices, has decreased the general risk COVID poses to well being. The place we’re in now may be very completely different to the place we had been firstly of the pandemic.
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How has COVID affected Australians’ well being? New report reveals the place we have failed and finished properly
One of the primary traits of this transition part of the pandemic is a shift in the direction of a risk-based strategy to COVID. The focus of public well being interventions might be to focus on essentially the most susceptible to COVID locally. This means guaranteeing older age teams, these with underlying well being circumstances and others at elevated danger of extreme outcomes from COVID are adequately protected.
Our COVID response will prioritise these at increased danger of extreme illness.
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What would possibly get in the way in which?
A clean path via this transition part and into the subsequent part is reliant on persevering with to keep up a excessive degree of inhabitants immunity general. One of the largest challenges is the best way to promote the uptake of vaccines because the perceived risk of COVID fades.
The problem in guaranteeing a excessive uptake of boosters is a worldwide downside. Waning immunity, which could possibly be topped up with extra vaccine doses, stays a big concern and we have to discover higher methods to handle this problem.
The principal problem for well being authorities proper now could be to, on the one hand, acknowledge the discount within the danger COVID poses whereas, then again, guaranteeing folks don’t turn out to be complacent and utterly ignore COVID.
Health authorities are additionally propping up very fatigued and stretched well being techniques.
So when will it finish?
The WHO’s recognition we’re coming into a transition part of the pandemic means we’re one step nearer to the top of the pandemic. But whereas pandemics start with a bang, they don’t finish that manner.
Pandemics fade as people and populations regularly return to residing their lives in a extra “regular” manner as their danger adjustments. This could be extremely messy, with nations transitioning out of the emergency response part of the pandemic at completely different instances.
So the pandemic isn’t over however an finish is in sight.
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COVID will quickly be endemic. This doesn’t suggest it is innocent or we hand over, simply that it is a part of life
Hassan Vally doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that will profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.
