Today brings to a close the last of 13 federal health emergency declarations first enacted Jan. 31, 2020, to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and its devastating effect on lives, health care, the economy, education and most every aspect of life across the globe.
While the decision by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to end the pandemic-era emergency affects federally funded programs (see facts) and may signal an official end to the pandemic, faculty and researchers at the University of Michigan continue to use and build on the knowledge gained and problems presented by the pandemic, using it as a catalyst for research and discoveries across a range of fields touched by COVID-19.
Epidemic, pandemic, endemic. Where are we now?
Jon Zelner, associate professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health, examines how we classify where we are in the stage of infectious and disease transmission caused COVID-19.
With the end of the federal public health emergency in the U.S. and word last week that the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency, it would seem the pandemic is at an end as well-but not so fast, Zelner says.
There were about 10,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19 from mid-April to early May and about 1,100 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"I think where we are right now is a kind of a transition phase between an epidemic-or even a pandemic-into a kind of endemic phase. I think it's a different kind of endemic phase than maybe we expected," Zelner said. "I think when we hear the word endemic, sometimes we think that means kind of fading into the background.
"What we're seeing instead is kind of a state of elevated respiratory infection rates overall and death from these kinds of infections in general. And so we're not reverting back to where we were pre-pandemic, but we're kind of finding something that looks like a new normal. But it's not necessarily one that we should be that happy with."
