Our Endemic COVID Future Is Probably Not What You Think--Why More Action Is Necessary Now (A long 🧵 ):

Many think we're already “post-COVID.” We're not, but it does beg the question of what the future has in store for us. If we ignore how tired everyone is of #COVID19 and instead explore the latest data and studies, we may see that we've not yet fully understood or adjusted to our COVID future. We've gone back to “old normal” when a “new normal” is necessary.

WHY WE'RE NOT POST-COVID

No, the pandemic is not over. The World Health Organization says we're still in a pandemic. WHO declared the public health emergency on 30 January 2020 and a pandemic on 11 March 2020, and it's the entity that gets to decide it's over--not you, me, or President Biden. Days ago, WHO held a meeting to discuss COVID, and it determined the pandemic remains a public health emergency of international concern.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/01/30/who-to-keep-highest-alert-over-covid-as-public-health-emergency-of-international-concern

Some claim COVID is endemic, but this is not true. It will be endemic, eventually, but it isn't yet. For a disease to be endemic, it must be consistently present and cause a steady, predictable number of people to get sick. This is far from the case with COVID-19 right now. In the last three months, the US has seen two variants become predominant in rapid succession, and these were variants scientists had only just discovered four months earlier. That is not predictable. https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions

The US has also had three surges of hospitalizations in the past year. Unlike the flu, which has a predictable annual season, COVID is not yet steady.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions

The US has not had a significant surge in COVID death ina year, although it continues to have a troubling level of COVID fatalities, losing around 3,500 people a week. But, we may yet see another significant wave of deaths. Other nations, like Japan and Sweden, have experienced their first- or second-highest levels of #COVID19 deaths of the pandemic in the past month or so.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=new_deaths_smoothed_per_million&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=SWE~JPN~NOR~AUS~HKG~FIN

None of this suggests that we've yet reached a stable place with COVID. Experts warn new variants could soon cause yet another surge of illness and hospitalization.
https://today.tamu.edu/2023/01/30/what-you-need-to-know-about-xbb-1-5-covids-latest-variant/

BUT WHAT MIGHT OUR COVID-ENDEMIC FUTURE LOOK LIKE?

Too many folks repeat the discredited idea that COVID is “just the flu.” It's led to folks thinking that COVID will be a minor inconvenience for the vast majority of the public on some annual basis. First of all, "just another flu" would be nothing to take lightly. The flu hospitalizes between 250,000 to 600,000 people in the US most years, and it kills between 20,000 to 60,000 people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statistics_by_flu_season

But #COVID19 is not "just the flu.” A new study suggests that our endemic future is one with risks that demand much more public, not just individual, action. It concludes that “individuals seeking to opt out of adverse outcomes upon SARS-CoV-2 infection will find it challenging to do so, as large reductions in contact rate are required to reduce the risk of infection.”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.22.23284884v1.full

Some specific findings from this study include:

There's little individuals can do to protect themselves short of enormous sacrifice if we don't implement public health solutions. Vaccinated people wishing to reduce their frequency of infection by half will need to reduce their contact rate 10-fold. People who only reduce their contact rate by half will “experience infections rates only marginally less” than those who have a median level of contacts with others.

People who are vaccinated and not taking measures to reduce their contact rate can expect to spend an average of 6 days a year acutely sick with COVID-19 and be infected 1.4x annually. That's a #COVID19 infection every 8.5 months on average. Now is a good time to remind the "just the flu" folks that the average American gets the flu once every 10 years or so.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/keyfacts.htm

The study estimates that 2% of vaccinated individuals who have a median contact rate will experience long COVID so severe that it impacts their employment. Sounds small, but think of 1 of every 50 people being that disabled. That is a frightening situation.

@augieray

“… of the ***vaccinated***”

So, among those who’ve done all they can to protect themselves from the impacts. One presumes that the impact will be even higher among the unvaccinated.