When Will the Pandemic Truly Be ‘Over’?

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Original Article: When Will the Pandemic Truly Be ‘Over’?

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It was a political stumble that turned into a policy two-step. In a 60 Minutes interview, US President Joe Biden declared the Covid pandemic over. Within 12 hours, public health officials, including in his own administration, weighed in to say “No, it’s not.” And within 12 hours after that, the White House—somewhat—walked his comments back.

Chalk it up to exuberance—the updated boosters were just rolling out—or to pandemic fatigue. But look past the immediate messaging failure, and the episode poses an important question: If the pandemic isn’t over yet, how will we know when it is?

It’s a question that can be countered with layers of answers. Official pronouncements for instance: The World Health Organization says “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight,” while the Department of Health and Human Services notes that the US remains in a public health emergency that could be redeclared next month. Or metrics, for example: According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all declining—but at the same time, Covid has been ranked the third-leading cause of death in the US. Meanwhile, only a third of US residents who are over 50, and thus considered at higher risk of illness, have taken the full four-shot vaccine protocol. As of last week, only 4.4 million people—1.5 percent of those eligible—had received the newest bivalent booster.

Look past that mess of contradictions, and beyond them lies a difficult reality: We might never achieve a benchmark that lets us declare the pandemic is behind us. The best “over” we may be able to hope for is that it settles into an endemic state, present but no longer overwhelming. Worst case: It persists, but we cease to care.

“There’s no exact point at which we can say, ‘OK, we’re done,’” says Jennifer Kates, a health policy analyst and senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “And that’s hard, because people want certainty. Where we are today is very different than where we were a year and a half ago, when the vaccines were new. But we are...

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