Review Article

Wrestling with Time: from Pandemic to Endemic Are We Heading to the Beginning of an End

Hina Latif
Department of Medicine, KEMU, Lahore
Rabia Rathore
Department of Medicine, KEMU, Lahore
Nasir Farooq
Department of Medicine, KEMU, Lahore
Adil Iqbal
Department of Medicine, KEMU, Lahore

✉ Correspondence: Hina Latif Email: hinalatif2011@gmail.com

DOI https://doi.org/10.70302/jpsim.v3i2.2220
Volume: 3, Issue 2 Pages: 103–108 Published: 15 Jun 2022
Received: 09 Jan 2022 Accepted: 09 Apr 2022 Published Online: 15 Jun 2022

Abstract

On 30th January 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced COVID-19 outbreak as the sixth public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), and on March 11, 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 as pandemic naming the corona virus disease (COVID-19) and the virus that causes it. SARS-CoV-2 has recently emerged as a global threat, directly affecting human life owing to its morbidity and mortality and indirectly, due to the enormous economic and psychological impact produced by social isolation, the most effective measure so far. From March 2020 to early 2022, many variants of SARSC0V-2 have been identified driving different waves of COVID-19. Every single day we hear about some new variant with more rapid transmission rate and more severity. Currently the world is facing another wave of covid-19 because of omicron variant which was initially said to be milder disease intensity variant but highly transmissible. Experts were of the opinion of building herd immunity and getting covid-19 limited to some specific areas in the form of a milder ENDEMIC disease in future with variants like omicron. But every single day, exploding surge in omicron cases n mortalities make us all question the concept of pandemicity to endemicity. Meanwhile all we can do to lessen the burden caused by COVID -19 is to vaccinate more n more people, booster doses and to take help of some new antiviral drugs with proven efficacy along with social distancing and mask wearing.

Keywords
SARS-CoV-2 different waves of covid-19 in Pakistan covid-19 from pandemic to endemic.

How to Cite This Article

Latif H, Rathore R, Farooq N, Iqbal A. Wrestling with Time: from Pandemic to Endemic Are We Heading to the Beginning of an End. J Pak Soc Intern Med. 2022;3(2):103–108. doi:10.70302/jpsim.v3i2.2220

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Conflict of Interest

All authors declare no competing interests.

Disclosed in accordance with ICMJE and COPE guidelines.

Funding

No specific funding was received for this research.

Funder information follows the Crossref Funder Registry standard.

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CC BY CC BY 4.0 This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. May be shared and adapted with attribution. © 2022 Journal of Pakistan Society of Internal Medicine.
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