Most Americans, weary after two years of fighting COVID, are resigning themselves to a future that involves living alongside the disease indefinitely.
A new Kaiser Family Foundation survey shows 75 percent in the US are “tired” of the pandemic and 77 percent believe most people will eventually get the virus. Still, a third of those surveyed see the pandemic as the country’s biggest problem.
“But I’m hopeful that we’re going to get to a better place in the coming months,” says Dr. Stuart Ray, an infectious disease expert at John Hopkins.
Dr. Stuart puts that hope in part on the end of the Omicron surge. The infectious disease specialist is one of many experts who believe it may signal a shift from COVID being a pandemic, to an endemic. That means it would become like dealing with the flu, a deadly disease in our midst without major disruptions to daily life.
“Tuberculosis and malaria are endemic in some countries and have devastating effects. Millions of people die every year from these endemic diseases. So just because it’s endemic doesn’t mean it’s mild,” warns Dr. Stuart.
Experts point to the need for better vaccines.
“It looks like in the coming months we’re going to hear about the results of an Omicron antigen vaccine which will probably be combined with the ancestral vaccine antigens and so that combination may provide better, broader coverage,” says Dr. Stuart.
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Right now, it’s nearly impossible to get certain treatments and that needs to change.
“I hope they will be able to make those agents available to people everywhere,” Dr. Stuart says.
As the coronavirus mutates, it tends to become more contagious, according to Duke Health’s Dr. Jonathan Quick, author of “The End of Epidemics.”
“The last two years have been stunning as we’ve seen this progression of variants,” says Dr. Quick.
Often, like with Omicron, more transmissible variants are less deadly, but that’s another thing you can’t count on.
“But what would be really unfortunate is after all the current viral activity going on with Omicron, we had a variant, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t, that combines both the contagiousness of omicron and the deadliness of Delta,” says Dr. Quick.
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