GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – The coronavirus has been widely considered a pandemic since it quickly spread around the globe back in March. But many people are curious as to what classification it may see next.
“The definitions of when something becomes a pandemic versus an epidemic versus endemic – every single different country’s health organization, including the World Health Organization, have different classifications,” says Prevea Health CEO Dr. Ashok Rai, “The percentage of people affected, how quickly it’s spreading, all of those factors come into those definitions.”
Pandemics are generally described as prevalent spread over a whole country or the world. An epidemic is a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time. While an endemic is something that is present in a community at all times – like chicken pox in American children, or Malaria in many African countries.
There are some concerns that COVID-19 could become endemic in parts of the world, particularly in the United States. However, determining endemic nature of a virus could take a while to detect.
“Like most of viruses, they eventually become something that’s part of our life. They don’t just die out. But some do,” Rai tells the WTAQ Morning News with Matt and Earl, “Is it going to be something we live with every day? Or is it something that’s going to be gone? That’s going to be really hard to tell, and it might be a year or two before we really know that fact…I think we have to see how this coronavirus and its unique properties what happens as more and more mutations happen. It mutates every day. It doesn’t do anything to the virus in those mutations, but sometimes it does.”
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