Thread by @jljcolorado

1/ @Nature: "COVID-19: endemic doesn’t mean harmless"

"The word ‘endemic’ has become one of the most misused of the pandemic. And many of the errant assumptions made encourage a misplaced complacency."

By @ArisKatzourakis

nature.com/articles/d4158…

2/ "A disease can be endemic and both widespread & deadly. Malaria killed more than 600,000 ppl in 2020. 10M fell ill with tuberculosis that same year & 1.5M died. Endemic certainly does not mean that evolution has somehow tamed a pathogen so that life simply returns to ‘normal’"

3/ "There is a widespread, rosy misconception that viruses evolve to become more benign. This is not the case: there is no predestined evolutionary outcome for virus to become more benign, especially ones, such as SARS-CoV-2, in which most transmission happens bf severe disease"

4/ "The best way to prevent more, more-dangerous or more-transmissible variants from emerging is to stop unconstrained spread, and that requires many integrated public-health interventions, including, crucially, vaccine equity."

5/ "Thinking that endemicity is both mild and inevitable is more than wrong, it is dangerous: it sets humanity up for many more years of disease, including unpredictable waves of outbreaks. [Better] to consider how bad things could get if we keep giving the virus opportunities."

6/ PS: a related, more humorous take;