<\/p>\n
NPR<\/p>\n
Four years after SARS-CoV2 sparked a devastating global pandemic, U.S. health officials now consider COVID-19 an endemic disease.<\/p>\n
“At this point, COVID-19 can be described as endemic throughout the world,”\u00a0Aron Hall<\/a>, the deputy director for science at the CDC’s coronavirus and other respiratory viruses division, told NPR in an interview.<\/p>\n That means, essentially, that COVID is here to stay in predictable ways.<\/p>\n The classification doesn’t change any official recommendations or guidelines for how people should respond to the virus. But the categorization does acknowledge that the SARS-CoV2 virus that causes\u00a0COVID<\/a>\u00a0will continue to circulate and cause illness indefinitely, underscoring the importance of people getting vaccinated and taking other steps to reduce their risk for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n “It is still a very significant problem, but one that can now be managed against the backdrop of many public health threats and not as sort of a singular pandemic threat,\u201d Hall says. \u201cAnd so how we approach COVID-19 is very similar to how we approach other endemic diseases.”<\/p>\n