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A comment on Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado. Parent comment

Re:Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado by ajsnigrutin on Thursday January 06, 2022 @01:01PM (#29827170)
But does it matter? If omicron becomes the "new flu" (or "the new cold") for the young and healthy, and with vaccines even for old and weak, do we have to call it a "pandemic" anymore?

I mean... did we have a "cold pandemic" or a "flu pandemic" before 2020? I'm pretty sure most of the planet had a cold every winter, and we just lived with it. Same with the flu... risk-groups died, and noone bothered the young with it, we just called it "normal life".

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Re:Omicron at 100% Prevalence, Colorado by neogodless on Thursday January 06, 2022 @01:17PM (#29827456)
> In epidemiology, an infection is said to be endemic in a population when that infection is constantly maintained at a baseline level in a geographic area without external inputs.

> A widespread endemic disease with a stable number of infected individuals is not a pandemic.

The cold and flu are "stable" albeit seasonal. While we might expect that outcome for variations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we're not there yet. A rapidly exploding number of infections is not a stable number of infected individuals.

At any rate, some people getting vaccinated and choosing to live as if the infections do not exist does not "end the pandemic."

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