Experts Can ’ t Agree If We ’ re Still in a Pandemic

As a health journalist, I’ve written the phrase “the COVID-19 pandemic” more times than I care to count in the four years since the World Health Organization (WHO) first used that term on March 11, 2020. But lately, the word “pandemic” has given me pause. Maybe you’ve noticed it too: these days, a lot of people refer to the pandemic in the past tense. “During COVID,” they say, or, “when we were in the pandemic.” The implication is that the virus is gone and the pandemic is over. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The former is clearly untrue. The SARS-CoV-2 virus still kills thousands of people around the world each month, saddles still more with chronic symptoms known as Long COVID, and continues to evolve, with the highly transmissible JN.1 variant recently causing waves of infection across the globe. But are we still a pandemic? No one seems to know for sure. When I asked Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), she didn’t give a direct answer. “Rather than getting caught up in the semantics of it,” she says, people should feel confident that “we are outside of the emergency [phase]. But I don’t want folks to forget that COVID is still here and still poses a risk.” Even Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic prevention and preparedness at the WHO, admitted that the issue is a “confusing...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news