“Right now we’re still approaching the COVID situation as a pandemic. There is definitely some thought in the scientific community that there’s going to be a progression of this pandemic to a more endemic state,” said Dr. Richard Lorraine, medical director for the Montgomery County Office of Public Health. Lorraine addressed members of the county health board virtually during a meeting earlier this month to offer a status report of where things could go in the long term.
“What I wanted to look at was sort of a larger overview of where we are at this point,” Lorraine said. “That’s been the focus, and the way the data is looking, particularly the emergence of the variants, it is very, very unlikely that we’re going to be able to achieve this magical herd immunity number and entirely eliminate COVID-19,” Lorraine went on to say. “It is far more likely that it’s going to transition from a pandemic state to an endemic state.”
“We started off by looking at this pandemic and then trying to develop vaccination which was done incredibly well with some very effective vaccines,” he said. “But the focus still at this point is trying to eradicate the disease.” An endemic, as Lorraine stated, is a “disease” that is “present within a particular region.” He added that it “spreads at a baseline level every year without causing major disruption to people’s lives.”
Earlier this year, the inoculation process took form with the advent of the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic brought restrictions, health and safety protocols and social distancing measures. The World Health Organization declared it a pandemic in March 2020, according to Lorraine, who defined the term as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large group of people.”
Referencing a slide of “incomplete” data for COVID-19 cases and deaths for Pennsylvania over the course of the pandemic up to Aug. 31, Lorraine appeared somewhat optimistic. “It becomes more, as I often delineate things in medicine, it’s more of a nuisance than a problem,” Lorraine said, using the “common cold” as an example.
“But this is what we’re talking about when we talk about the difference between herd immunity ending a pandemic by eradicating an illness and a general level of immunity within the population which instead mitigates the seriousness of the illness,” Lorraine later said. “So this slide to me represents some hope for the future.” For Lorraine, “endemicity” appears to be the next phase. “Now this indicates to me that there’s a very good possibility we are getting to that point where there’s enough immunity in the general population that it’s going to mitigate the seriousness of the COVID illnesses,” he said. We’re still gonna see a number of cases, but less and less of them are going to require hospitalization on a pro rata basis and less and less deaths too.”
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