DETROIT – It’s a question many people have been asking since March 2020: When will the COVID pandemic end? Many also want to know how it will end and how will we actually know it’s over?
Every pandemic in history has ended at some point. Even without the advances in sciences we have today. A growing number of experts now believe it’s highly unlikely COVID-19 will ever completely go away.
When cases are no longer out of control and hospitals aren’t overflowing with patients, many experts predict the spread of the coronavirus will be more like a seasonal flu. With mutations like the delta variant and the potential for other variants to form -- nobody is able to predict exactly how prevalent COVID-19 will be in the future.
As more people are getting vaccinated, federal health officials are already thinking about how to measure the end of the pandemic. Officials are also looking into how to track the coronavirus once it becomes an endemic. That means a disease has a constant presence in a population, but isn’t affecting a significant number of people.
The CDC said the United States is still firmly in a pandemic phase. So, how will we know when the pandemic is over? There probably won’t be a single moment. It’s something that will happen over time.