LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — The COVID-19 pandemic persists nearly two years after it shut down much of America, but there’s a possible silver lining in the latest outbreak of cases.
Angela Sandlin with Baptist Health La Grange said endemic diseases, like the seasonal flu, are limited to a particularly geographic are and easier to predict. And she said omicron could be the variant that brings COVID-19 to the endemic phase.
A pandemic, the current state of COVID-19, is when an illness crosses international boundaries and spreads quickly.
“It still would be a widespread infection, but you’d have a little more seasonal variability with it,” said Dr. Jason Smith, chief medical officer at UofL Health. “You won’t have the massive peaks that we’re currently seeing and you won’t have the level of positivity across the entire world or the global regions that we are currently seeing with this outbreak of COVID-19.”
Ironically, Smith and Sandlin said it’s because omicron is so contagious that it may help.
“We are seeing more exposure,” Smith said. “More exposure develops more immunity. More immunity will lead to the the so-called herd immunity, which will change this into a more seasonal endemic-type problem as opposed to the pandemic we’ve been dealing with.”
But Sandlin argues that while herd immunity is good for the community, for an individual, vaccination is the way to go.
“It’s such a roll of the dice to say ‘Oh, well, I’ll just get COVID to help with herd immunity,'” she said. “We would rather not have to do that, because sometimes, we don’t know who could have severe COVID illness. We have some predictors, but we still don’t always know who will be harmed by it in very serious way.”
Sandlin said the rate of spread is a key factor that is considered when determining at what point a pandemic transitions into an endemic. But ultimately, she and Smith said there’s no telling when that will happen or if omicron will play a key role.
“(The pandemic is) going to end in a whisper, and that change from pandemic to endemic, it’s not like you say, ‘Hey, this is the day that it happens,'” Smith said.
“We’ll probably be able to almost feel it, as if things relax a little and it doesn’t seem to be spreading as fast,” Sandlin added. “We can look at less hospitalizations, less people out of work.”
So, in the meantime, Sandlin urges people to stay vigilant.
“It can be a severe illness. It’s still a pandemic,” she said. “So we still need to take the kind of precautions that we’ve been doing and trying to keep each other healthy.”
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