Many people have asked me “When will COVID be over?”. Here is the answer: It will officially end on March 18, 2022 at 2:43 in the afternoon.
There. Official. Over.
I hope that you can see the absurdity here.
The game will not end when the clock runs out.
The game will not end with a final score and fireworks erupting from the top of the stadium.
The plastic plug on the turkey will not suddenly pop out.
With any infectious disease, epidemic or pandemic, the date of the end is never clear. Even in hindsight, epidemiologists will not be able to point to any specific date or time that the pandemic ended. Rather, there will be a general realization that the acute phase of infection has passed and that a return to normal (as in prior to the pandemic) activities will resume. The return to those activities will quietly and incrementally begin.
We will see the signs.
Some people will eat indoors at restaurants quickly; some will still be a little more careful. Some will go to movies; some will still rely on Netflix.
Some will hug and kiss their friends; some will continue to fist bump.
Masking will still be observed in some settings, but less and less and those who choose to mask will begin to diminish.
Some mandates will stay on for some extra months while others will be abated more quickly.
All of these things are natural and to be expected.
It does seem, as I wrote about a month ago, that Omicron spread so rapidly across this country and the world, and so many people were infected, that the number of additional vulnerable people has been reduced dramatically.
If you add all those people who have been immunized to all those people who have been infected and recovered and to all those people who were infected but remained so sub-clinical in their infections that they did not notice nor report any symptoms and to those people in the population who, for reasons we do not understand, are not susceptible to infection of a particular pathogenic agent, we come up to a very high percentage of the population.
Does this mean that the virus is “extinct”? No. The only virus that has ever been eradicated from the world is smallpox.
What is does mean is that the circulating virus and any new variants that arise from it will be “endemic”. This term means that it is with us forever, but that the number of cases is manageable (meaning that infections will not overwhelm our healthcare capacities), and that the level of annual hospitalizations and deaths is “acceptable”.
This is what you could call “viral stasis”, the situation in which the number of hospitalizations and deaths per year remains relatively constant and is accepted as a normal risk.
If you take a look at the number of cases of infectious diseases in the United States in 2019, the year before the outbreak of COVID-19, you see what Viral Stasis looks like.
The most common infectious diseases in that year were:
- Chlamydia with over 1.8 million cases
- Gonorrhea with over 600,000 cases and
- Syphilis with about 130.000 cases.
The BIG 3 STDs are by far the most prevalent infections in this country. We don’t shut down our society to deal with these outbreaks although “masks” for male participation are highly recommended.
This chart shows the next group of infectious diseases with more than 10,000 cases identified in 2019:
As you can see, there are many diseases which cause infections, hospitalizations, and deaths each year for which we remain accepting.
This will be the future of COVID-19. It will settle into our consciousnesses as another one of the circulating infectious agents that can result in disease. We will learn to accept this potentiality for us, our family, our children and our friends, much as previous generations accepted disease from Mumps, Rubella, Measles, etc., and far less outbreaks after vaccinations for Tetanus, Typhoid, Polio, Smallpox, etc.
The vast majority of the population will never even know that they have been infected; they will write it off as another mild “cold”. Those who have not been vaccinated will constitute the fraction of the population that becomes hospitalized or dies and they will be most susceptible to new variants that circulate. But the numbers will be around 10,000-20,000 deaths per year, more comparable to influenza, and will just be another disease statistic that affects the most vulnerable in our population.
I do believe we have entered the twilight of COVID. Midnight may still be ahead of us by weeks or months, but I do believe that we have passed out of the bright glare of day.