From pandemic to endemic: Can 2022 succeed where 2021 failed?

 Health experts, however, are preaching caution, saying there's too much uncertainty about how virus will evolve, how much immunity society has built up, potential damage if people stop being careful

After two years of contagion and death, Covid is shifting again. Omicron is spreading faster than any previous variant, but it’s also proving less malevolent. There’s growing talk that the worst pandemic of the past century may soon be known in another way — as endemic.

Spain threw out the idea this week, when Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it’s time to think about new ways of living with Covid long term, such as the world does with the flu. Other countries jumped in, saying they may be moving toward a new chapter of the disease.

Health experts, however, are preaching caution, saying there’s too much uncertainty about how the virus will evolve, how much immunity society has built up and potential damage if people stop being careful.

From pandemic to endemic: Can 2022 succeed where 2021 failed?
It’s inevitable that governments will eventually need to regard Covid as one of many public health challenges that can be managed — rather than one requiring the urgency and focus devoted since early 2020.

The appetite for economically damaging lockdowns is long gone. Vaccines are protecting swathes of the population, and there’s even hope that omicron, with its frenetic spread and less powerful punch, may be hastening the path to the pandemic’s exit.

“We probably are starting to see a transition phase toward this becoming an endemic disease, which doesn’t mean that we have to stop being very prudent,” Spain’s deputy prime minister, Nadia Calvino, told Bloomberg Television. “But it does signal that we should take measures that are very different to the ones we had to take two years ago.”