A WHO official says COVID is still capable of causing huge epidemics.
COVID-19 is far from becoming an endemic disease and could still spark large outbreaks around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.
Director of the WHO’s health emergencies programme, Michael Ryan, said Thursday it was wrong to think that COVID-19 would mean the end of the problem once it calmed down and became endemic.
“I certainly don’t think we’ve come anywhere close to being endemic with this virus,” Ryan said in a question-and-answer session on WHO’s social media channels.
“It’s not an endemic disease yet,” he said.
Ryan said the coronavirus has not yet settled into a seasonal or transmission pattern and remains capable of creating huge epidemics.
“Don’t think that endemic means it’s over, it’s mild or it’s not a problem. That’s not the case at all,” Ryan said, naming tuberculosis and malaria as endemic diseases that still kill millions of people a year.
WHO COVID-19 technical lead Maria Van Kerkhove, who contracted the disease herself and is isolating in the United States, said the virus continues to circulate at high levels, causing “huge amounts of death and devastation.”
“We are still in the middle of this pandemic. We all wish we weren’t. But we are not at an endemic stage,” she said.
The past week has seen the lowest number of COVID-19 deaths since the first days of the pandemic in early 2020.
However, more than 20,000 deaths have been reported, with Ryan saying “still too many… we should be happy, but we shouldn’t be happy”.
He explained that once epidemic diseases have developed into an endemic pattern, they can often become childhood diseases like measles and diphtheria because “newborn children are susceptible”.
But when vaccination levels fall, as they did with measles, epidemics can break out again.