If you have been looking for a sense of pandemic closure, the World Health Organization’s declaration Friday that it was ending the Covid global health emergency was about as close to it as you are likely to get.
The reality is that although battlefield metaphors are often employed to describe humankind’s struggle with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, there will be no 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month-like moment signaling that an armistice has been achieved.
There are no fixed borders between a pandemic, when a pathogen is new to humans and causing wide scale disease and often high levels of death, and the ensuing endemic phase, when the disease has settled into something that our immune systems can better cope with, explained Marc Lipsitch, an infectious diseases epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.