The chief scientist of the World Health Organization, Dra. Soumya Swaminathan recently said it could be Covid-19 entering a stage where it will become endemic, which means some people will become infected, but the levels at which it will circulate will be low to moderate.
Swaminathan said this in an interview with The Wire news website, in which he said it was “very very feasible” that the situation would continue as it is now, with ups and downs in disease levels in different parts of the world. country, depending on natural immunity and vaccine coverage in certain areas.
When does a disease become endemic?
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), endemism refers to the “constant presence and / or prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area.”
According to an article published in the journal Science in 2020, when epidemics become endemic, they become “increasingly tolerated” and the responsibility for protecting them shifts from government to the individual.
An epidemic, on the other hand, refers to a scenario in which the number of cases of the disease increases, often suddenly, which means that the cases exceed the expected levels. For some rare diseases such as poliomyelitis, plague and rabies, even a single case may justify the investigation of health authorities.
It should be noted that the number of cases of a disease that are considered “constant” would be different for different areas and would also depend on the population of the specific geographical area. For example, if 200 cases a day are considered endemic in country A with a population of 200 million, the same will not be considered endemic for country B, which has a much smaller population of, say, 20 million.
What does this mean for India and the world?
Of the seven coronaviruses known to infect humans, those that have emerged in the last two decades, including SARS (10% mortality rate), MERS (35-36% mortality rate) and now SARS-CoV-2 are those that are cause for concern as they are capable of causing serious illness and even death.
Of these three, while humans are still treating SARS-CoV-2 and are likely to continue to do so in the coming years, SARS (emerged in China) and MERS (emerged in Saudi Arabia) they were locally contained. The last case of SARS was detected in 2003, however, MERS is still circulating.
At a Covid-19 vaccination center in Ahmedabad.
A modeling study published in the journal Science earlier this year said that in a few years, SARS-CoV-2 may be no more virulent than the common cold like other benign human coronaviruses currently circulating in the population and that they do not cause serious illness.
It is not in the interest of a pathogen like SARS-CoV-2 to become so severe that it kills all its guests. In other words, the virus needs a host to survive; in this case, it requires a human host to maintain its own survival, so as more people become infected or vaccinated, the virus should be less life-threatening, but still continue to infect people.
On what factors can endemicity depend?
It is difficult to predict when exactly Covid-19 will become endemic to India or the world. With the deployment of vaccination underway and more and more people infected, some proportions of people have developed natural immunity, or have vaccine-induced immunity or a combination of both.
According to the WHO Covid-19 scorecard, as of August 25, there were 213,050,725 confirmed cases of the disease worldwide since the outbreak began in 2020. Worldwide there have been administered about 5 billion doses of vaccines, but this is far less than what is required to fully vaccinate the world’s population of more than 7 billion people.
In addition, most of the 5 billion doses have been administered in richer countries, meaning low-income countries are far behind, in part because they depend on receiving vaccine imports, from programs like COVAX.
According to Our World in Data, as of August 26, 33% of the world’s population had received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine and 25% were completely vaccinated. 5.08 billion doses have been administered worldwide and 33.85 million are now administered daily. Only 1.4% of the population in low-income countries has received at least one dose.
But there are restrictions on supply, which means that the supply of vaccines is definitely not suitable for the world’s population, and even if it were, some people are hesitant to get vaccinated.
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