You’ve received both of your vaccine doses. Our challenge in the U.S., then, may not be vanquishing the virus that has dominated the past year of our lives. That doesn’t mean it will be everywhere, all the time, but it may not disappear completely, either. In the U.S., as in many parts of the world, experts say COVID-19 is likely, at least for the foreseeable future, to become endemic–a disease that circulates regularly, if not as catastrophically as it has over the past year. But in places like the U.S., where the virus continues to spread widely, elimination is at this point a far less attainable goal than management. New Zealand has effectively eliminated COVID-19 through a combination of domestic lockdowns and border-control measures, and Australia and multiple Asian countries have used similar tactics to dramatically tamp down the virus’s spread.
Israel has vaccinated a significant chunk of its population, enough to begin feasibly planning for a post-herd-immunity reality. There have been, and will continue to be, global success stories. Already, in many countries with access to vaccines, logistical hurdles and vaccine hesitancy have proved to be formidable adversaries meanwhile, many nations in the developing world don’t have access to vaccines at all. And though highly effective vaccines were developed and deployed in record time, it will be a mammoth undertaking to inoculate enough of the world’s population to achieve herd immunity, especially with the new variants in hot pursuit. New viral variants even more contagious than those that started the pandemic are spreading across the world.
The virus has infected more than 100 million people worldwide and killed more than 2 million. The last scenario, in the case of COVID-19, is likely a ways off, if it ever arrives. Is it when the world reaches herd immunity, the benchmark at which enough people are immune to an infectious disease to stop its widespread circulation? Or is it when the disease is defeated, the last patient cured and the pathogen retired to the history books? When does a pandemic end? Is it when life regains a semblance of normality?