ATLANTA — Recently, the Fayette County school system announced it was shifting how it approaches COVID-19, recognizing the virus as endemic.
But, what is an endemic anyway?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, endemics "occur when an agent and susceptible hosts are present in adequate numbers, and the agent can be effectively conveyed from a source to the susceptible hosts."
Essentially, a pandemic becomes an endemic when the virus is only consistently present in a specific area or is “globally present but at expected or normal levels," according to the The World Health Organization.
Thus, disease spread and rates are “predictable," as opposed to skyrocketing, according to the Mailman School of Public Health. For example, malaria would be considered an endemic in certain countries and regions, the university added.
During the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda 2022 in January, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said his definition of COVID-19 endemicity would be a “non-disruptive presence without elimination” of the virus.
“Control means you have it [the virus] present, but it is present at a level that does not disrupt society,” Fauci said during the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda 2022 in January. “And I think that’s what most people feel when they talk about endemicity – where it is integrated into the broad range of infectious diseases that we experience.”
So, when can we expect the COVID pandemic to become and endemic?
Recently, our VERIFY team tackled this very question, where they found there is not a statistical cut-off for when the COVID pandemic will become an endemic.
“Each country is in a unique situation, and must chart its way out of the acute phase of the pandemic with a careful, stepwise approach,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom said on Jan. 24, 2022.
Our VERIFY team also found that while some states plan to start treating COVID as an endemic, organizations like the WHO have not yet pivoted on the issue.
“A pandemic is a characterization of a disease in view of its geographical spread. The term carries no recognition under international law and there is no general, formal mechanism for declaring the beginning or end of a pandemic,” the WHO wrote in an email to the VERIFY team.