The first two sentences of your article are

> Eradication is the reduction of an infectious disease's prevalence in the global host population to zero.[1]

> Two infectious diseases have successfully been eradicated: smallpox in humans and rinderpest in ruminants.

There is exactly one disease that has been eradicated in humans: smallpox, which took somewhere between 19 years and 27 years depending on when you consider the eradication effort to have started in earnest. We've gotten close with polio (after 40 years) and guinea worm (37 years). There are also a bunch of other diseases on that list where elimination efforts are in progress, but have not yet been completed.

Regardless, "eliminate COVID", should we decide to go down that path, is going to be a multi-decade project at best. It's also likely to be much harder than eradicating smallpox given the asymptomatic transmission and animal reservoirs. It might still be worth doing, in the same way that our eradication effort for measles is worth doing, but it's not worth holding up anything important until the effort completes considering that "until the effort completes" is likely to be a couple generations at the earliest.

You're arguing semantics now. Measles is effectively eradicated. Sure, if we all stopped getting the vaccine, there would be outbreaks. The important thing is that it can be controlled to an extent that it no longer poses a substantial burden on people's lives --- and the reason it isn't eradicated is less than full vaccination.

The point I was responding to was this idea that we should just settle for covid being endemic. So I'm really not sure why you are going on at about semantics.

My understanding is that you are advocating for continuing to wear masks, restrict gatherings, and push for vaccination until COVID is eradicated or close to it, and are also under the impression that "until COVID is eradicated or close to it" could be a matter of just a few months if everyone would just work together.

My point is it will not be just a few months. It will be decades. Even in the case of measles, it took almost 10 years to get from 250,000 cases / year in the Americas to 100, and we're starting from a lot more than 250,000 cases a year in the Americas this time.

If the alternative is 10 or 20 more years of restrictions, I think "settle for covid being endemic for now, with vaccines available for anyone who wants them, and maybe push eradication at a later date when most everyone has either natural or vaccine immunity and that job is easier" is in fact a better solution.