{"id":110243,"date":"2020-12-31T16:22:45","date_gmt":"2020-12-31T23:22:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=110243"},"modified":"2020-12-31T16:22:45","modified_gmt":"2020-12-31T23:22:45","slug":"who-predicts-covid-19-will-become-endemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/12\/31\/who-predicts-covid-19-will-become-endemic\/","title":{"rendered":"WHO predicts COVID-19 will become endemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Courtesy Adaderana<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

World Health Organization officials are predicting that the destiny\u201d of the COVID-19 virus is to become endemic, suggesting it could continue to spread through the population at a steady rate despite a global vaccination effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a news conference, several senior WHO officials warned that the development of COVID-19 vaccines is no guarantee that the virus will be eradicated, proposing that a more realistic goal would be to reduce the threat of transmission to more manageable levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It appears at present that the destiny of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is to become endemic,\u201d said David Heymann, the London-based chair of the WHO\u2019s strategic and technical advisory group for infectious hazards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But its final destiny is not yet known. Fortunately, we have tools to save lives and these in combination with good public health … will permit us to learn to live with COVID-19.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a disease is endemic when it is constantly or predictably prevalent within a population or region. For example, chickenpox is endemic in much of North America, spreading at a steady rate among young children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr. Gerald Evans, chair of the infectious diseases division at Queen\u2019s University in Kingston, Ont., agrees that the COVID-19 virus is on track to follow several other human coronaviruses that have become endemic, most often causing mild respiratory symptoms, such as the common cold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Evans said some evolutionary biologists believe that after making the jump from animal to human populations, these endemic coronaviruses mutated over centuries to strike a pathogenic balance between ensuring effective transmission from person to person, without being so virulent as to kill off the host.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He projects that the COVID-19 virus could follow a similar evolutionary path, but said this process could be compressed over a shorter period of time because vaccine-induced herd immunity\u201d would limit the pool of potential hosts to favour more transmissible but less virulent versions of the disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can speed up the process of adapting the population to the new virus by using vaccines … so that we don\u2019t have to wait 100 years for this to become a sort of low-grade endemic coronavirus that causes a cold-like syndrome in wintertime around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Courtesy Adaderana World Health Organization officials are predicting that the destiny\u201d of the COVID-19 virus is to become endemic, suggesting it could continue to spread through the population at a steady rate despite a global vaccination effort. At a news conference, several senior WHO officials warned that the development of COVID-19 vaccines is no guarantee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category--19-"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}