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What Does it Mean to be Endemic?

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

This is a really good thread on where we go from here with Covid-19, and this bit stood out:

So, yes, our only viable choice left is covid becoming endemic. It didn’t have to be this way, but our leaders MADE a choice. And now they need to make another choice: They need to choose an “acceptable” level of COVID death & disease. Because pandemics don’t end by a disease just fading away, & pandemics don’t end with everyone able to completely forget about the disease. Pandemics end when we decide how much death and disease we’re satisfied with.

This "it's going to go away by Easter" mentality has been so destructive from the start, and I think it's stuck in some people's heads that it will just disappear and we can all just forget about it.

I also appreciated this at the end:

Every time I tweet about this I get people in mentions saying “but we don’t take precautions for the flu!” Those people are 100% WRONG! Thousands of people work daily to monitor, prepare for, & respond to fluctuations in flu number and in the flu virus itself! It’s a HUGE task!

There is a ton of people who pretend to shift from being experts in whatever the topic of the day is on social media, so it's always nice to see an actual expert explain things clearly like this.