what about? Corona may become a kind of endemic, but what is it?

Often seemingly simple questions are the most difficult to answer. How are you? Every week we try to find an answer to such questions. This time: Corona may become a kind of endemic, but what is this?

From pandemic to endemic

From a tour of a scientific journal temper nature It turns out that the participating scientists expect the coronavirus to go from pandemic to endemic at some point. The word “endemic” can also be found more and more in other media. What does endemism mean? What is the difference between a pandemic and an epidemic?

What is endemism?

If the disease is endemic, this means that the disease or pathogen always lies in the background. So the disease did not go away or eradicated, but it can be controlled, for example, with vaccination, education, or both. For example, influenza is endemic. Influenza viruses are always present, but due to the influenza vaccine, for example, large-scale outbreaks do not occur very often. By the way, it’s not that an endemic condition says anything about how sick a person is from something, it’s only about its prevalence. Very serious and minor diseases can be endemic.

It varies from country to country and sometimes also by region whether the disease is endemic or not. Polio or plague, for example, is not endemic in the Netherlands, but in Pakistan and Afghanistan. For example, plague occurs on this scale in the Congo and Madagascar. Suppose a Dutch person somehow contracted polio in the Netherlands, we are not immediately talking about an endemic epidemic. This is often referred to as a sporadic infection.

disagree

While many endemic diseases can be controlled, the disease or pathogen can spread faster than expected. Or for a new disease maker to appear on the scene that will make a lot of people sick at any given time, as was the case with the coronavirus at the time. If this happens, it is called an epidemic.

An epidemic does not necessarily have to be national, because the definition for that relates primarily to whether there are more cases of illness than previously thought. However, this is often the case.
If it is a local epidemic, it is often referred to as an outbreak. In the early ’90s, for example, there is something else polio outbreak In our country among the population of places where they live many people who for religious reasons prefer not to be vaccinated.

pandemic

Once an epidemic extends beyond an individual’s national borders and even across the continent, it is referred to as a pandemic. For example, COVID-19 is considered a pandemic. Once something becomes a pandemic, it doesn’t always have to be. So scientists questioned by nature believe that the coronavirus and COVID-19 will eventually become endemic. Whether and when this will happen is unknown.

(Brown: WHO CDC, Nature, Pubmed, Harvard, RIVM, AD)