What is the difference between an Epidemic and a Pandemic?

What Is a Pandemic?

A pandemic is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of individuals. A widespread endemic disease with a stable number of infected individuals is not a pandemic. Widespread endemic diseases with a stable number of infected individuals such as recurrences of seasonal influenza are generally excluded as they occur simultaneously in large regions of the globe rather than being spread worldwide.

An epidemic of influenza is different from the dreaded pandemic that scientists and world health officials fear is nigh. We might see an epidemic of seasonal influenza during any given year. In fact, we just had one.

What does Endemic Phase Mean?

What an endemic phase of a viral infections means is that it’s not causing the terrible hospitalizations of the pandemic phase but that we’ll have enough immunity of a population so it’s kept down to low levels.

• Epidemic is a sudden outbreak of a disease in a certain geographical area.
• Pandemic is an outbreak of a disease that has spread across several countries or continents. It is basically an epidemic that has spread internationally and covers a wider geographic area.

Preparing for the ‘endemic’ stage of COVID-19

There’s growing talk in the medical community that the COVID-19 pandemic may soon be entering the “endemic” phase.

What are the differences between a pandemic and an epidemic in the context of COVID-19?

“We’re still a way off” from COVID-19 reaching endemicity, Dr. Catherine Smallwood, a senior emergency officer and COVID-19 incident manager at the WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said during a virtual Europe news conference last week.

Exhausted after two years of the pandemic, many are wondering what exactly life will look like when we officially reach endemicity.

“We will likely not be masking, distancing, contact tracing, doing asymptomatic testing,” Dr. Gandhi said.

“We’ll manage it more like influenza, which is vaccines, treatment and recommending masks for the vulnerable inside,” Dr. Gandhi said.

Dr. Gandhi says the highly transmissible omicron variant could drive the pandemic into endemicity.

“There’s [an] incredible number of cases in both vaccinated and unvaccinated. What that does is it exposes you to the entire virus and you develop antibodies, T cells and B cells across the entire virus,” Dr. Gandhi said.

Infectious disease doctors are monitoring the omicron surge around the world. Data from samples of wastewater indicates omicron is declining.

When will the COVID-19 pandemic become endemic?

Infectious disease specialist Dr. Monica Gandhi says the pandemic could begin pivoting to an endemic status by early spring.

Dr. Fauci Addresses ‘Open Question’ Whether Omicron Can End Covid Pandemic

When could the COVID-19 pandemic switch to endemic?

Based on how Omicron is spreading and affecting hospitalization rates, an infectious diseases specialist says the COVID-19 pandemic could begin pivoting to an endemic status in higher-income countries by early spring.

“The Omicron surge will probably drive us fully into endemicity, where our death rates from COVID are low, where our hospitalizations are low. But it’s going to take past the Omicron surge,” Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at University of California, San Francisco, told CTVNews.ca in a video interview on Tuesday.

Gandhi said it’s far too early to suggest there’s currently a transition from pandemic to endemic – which is defined as when a disease is regularly found among particular people or in a certain area.

Omicron has changed the shape of the pandemic. Will it end it for good?

The world feared the worst when a worrying new coronavirus variant emerged in late November and ripped through South Africa at a pace not seen before in the pandemic.
But two months later, with Omicron dominant across much of the globe, the narrative has shifted for some.
“Levels of concern about Omicron tend to be lower than with previous variants,” Simon Williams, a researcher in public attitudes and behaviors towards Covid-19 at Swansea University, told CNN. For many, “the ‘fear factor of Covid’ is lower,” he said.

Omicron’s reduced severity compared to previous variants, and the perceived likelihood that individuals will eventually be infected, have contributed to that relaxation in people’s mindsets, Williams said. This has even caused some people to actively seek out the illness to “get it over with” — a practice experts have strongly warned against.

Can the Omicron variant of COVID-19 change the pandemic status to an endemic disease?

The European Medicines Agency says the spread of the Omicron coronavirus variant across the continent is pushing COVID-19 towards being an endemic disease that humanity can live with.

Will Covid go endemic?

The world is grappling with record cases of Covid-19 as Omicron spreads like no variant of the virus before it.

Yet some senior European figures, such as Spanish premier Pedro Sanchez, Switzerland’s interior minister, and the UK’s education secretary, have suggested in the past week that, as Omicron appears to cause less severe illness than earlier strains, it’s time to start thinking about the coronavirus as an endemic disease that we’ll just have to live with, like the flu.

In the Republic the move by the Government to relax close-contact rules from Friday – against the backdrop of a surge in cases leading to chronic staffing shortages across the healthcare system and wider economy – is also a tacit acknowledgment that we’re heading into a different phase.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) cautioned this week, however, that it is too early to declare that the disease – which has resulted in 320 million recorded cases and 5.5 million deaths over the past two years – has gone from being pandemic to endemic.

“Endemicity assumes that there’s stable circulation of the virus, at predictable levels and potentially known and predictable waves of epidemic transmission,” Catherine Smallwood, a senior emergency officer at WHO Europe, said on Tuesday, as the agency warned that more than half of Europe could be infected in the next six to eight weeks amid “a new west-to-east tidal wave seeping across the region”.

Can you get infected with the Omicron variant of COVID-19 twice?

In mid-December, a study conducted in the United Kingdom found the risk of COVID reinfection with the omicron variant was more than five times higher than delta, Reuters reported.

How long does it take for COVID-19 symptoms to appear with the Omicron variant?

“We know that the time that you are around a person that has Omicron in terms of exposure to the time that you actually manifest symptoms is shorter,” he said. “Originally, it could be” five to six days or even “up to 14 days before a person might manifest symptoms after getting infected.

Can I still have sex during the coronavirus pandemic?

If both of you are healthy and feeling well, are practicing social distancing and have had no known exposure to anyone with COVID-19, touching, hugging, kissing, and sex are more likely to be safe.