Nations like Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have already functionally declared an end to the pandemic in their countries, along with lifting almost all health restrictions even as other nations like Hong Kong and New Zealand are struggling with record-breaking COVID-19 surges.
A Science report said that according to Yonatan Grad, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, deciding when to sound the "all clear" is not a desirable task.
He asked, "Do you call it over" when there is a potential wave in one part of the globe although "it is a small part?"
Epidemiologist Salim Abdool Karim, the chief COVID-19 scientist of the South African government, COVID-19 has caused "such hardship" and economic challenges that there will be a temptation to declare the pandemic as over "sooner rather than later."
The prospect is worrying the health official. The formal declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern or PHEIC of the World Health Organization lawfully binds 196 signatories to follow recommendations of the WHO during the emergency.
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An expert said declaring the end of the pandemic will not be as easy as the flip of a switch.
PHEIC Announcement
Drug manufacturers have also signed contracts agreeing to make anti-COVID-19 pills more affordable until the reversal of PHEIC.
Other big, cooperative initiatives that were put in place to make diagnostics vaccines cost-oriented and to distribute them globally, all of those things this report specified, will fall away.
More so, those are the mechanisms needed by the poor nations, explained Karin, who also operates the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa. He added getting it wrong will lead to a high price.
To many others outside China, where COVID-19 first occurred, a statement by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus two years ago describing this week SARS-CoV-2 as a "worldwide pandemic" marked its official beginning.
However, his comments in March 2020 initiated no public health requirements. Instead, the declaration with practical implications was the PHEIC announcement dated January 30, 2020.
Such regulations leading the PHEIC necessitate signatory countries to report suspect outbreaks to WHO and back its responses, although the health organization has no way of enforcing such rules.
COVID-19 Not an Eradicable Infectious Disease
A Poynter report said that according to Andrew Noymer, associate professor of population health and disease prevention at the University of California, Irvine, the start point of a pandemic "is easier to pinpoint than the endpoint."
As has frequently been the case with the pandemic, many things can change. However, many researchers do not see a future where COVID-19 vanishes.
There are several reasons behind such thinking. Such reasons include virus is highly contagious that it can jump between humans and animals; the available vaccines and boosters, while exhibiting high efficacy, leave room for some breakthrough contagions; and not all people are vaccinated.
According to Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the virus will never completely disappear as it is an effectively spreading respiratory virus with an animal host. He added COVID-19 does not meet the definition of an "eradicable infectious disease."
Switching Back to Endemic
Noymer explained, declaring the end of the pandemic will not be as easy as the flip of a switch. In its most obscure edition, he added that the so-called "endemicity" takes place when every person with the illness infects just one other individual on average. There are other signs, though, of progress that epidemiologists will observe.
Scientists will also look to see that the waves of infection are turning more predictable, that hospitals are not worrying about capacity anymore, that fatality rates have dropped, and that the virus is no longer disrupting society by causing schools to shut down and workers to call in sick.
Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, the founding director of Boston University's Center of Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research, said a lot will rely on whether COVID-19 has faded enough for society to function "under status quo."
Related report about the pandemic being over is shown on Forbes' YouTube video below:
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