Endemic Covid: Is the pandemic entering its endgame?

Posted: January 17th 2022

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The is a really insightful article by James Gallagher, I hope he is right in his analysis, which tells us:

There is growing confidence that Omicron could be hurtling the UK into the pandemic endgame.

But what comes next? There will be no snap of the fingers to make the virus disappear. Instead, the new buzzword we'll have to get used to is "endemic" - which means that Covid is, without doubt, here to stay.

So, is a new Covid-era truly imminent and what will that actually mean for our lives?

"We're almost there, it is now the beginning of the end, at least in the UK," Prof Julian Hiscox, chairman in infection and global health at the University of Liverpool, tells me. "I think life in 2022 will be almost back to before the pandemic."

What's changing is our immunity. The new coronavirus first emerged two years ago in Wuhan, China, and we were vulnerable. It was a completely new virus that our immune systems had not experienced before and we had no drugs or vaccines to help.

The result was like taking a flamethrower into a fireworks factory. Covid spread explosively around the world - but that fire cannot burn at such high intensity forever.

For many, this was the inevitable fate of a virus that spreads through the air before you even know you're sick. "Endemicity was written into this virus," says Dr Elisabetta Groppelli, a virologist at St George's, University of London.

"I am very optimistic," she says. "We'll soon be in a situation where the virus is circulating, we will take care of people at risk, but for anybody else we accept they will catch it - and your average person will be fine."