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Q&A: COVID-19 will eventually be endemic, Butte County Public Health explains what that means.

A medical technician performs a nasal swab test on a motorist queued up in a line at a COVID-19 testing site.
David Zalubowski
/
AP Photo
A medical technician performs a nasal swab test on a motorist queued up in a line at a COVID-19 testing site.

Last week, top White House medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said COVID-19 is not going to be eradicated. Instead, it will eventually become endemic.

It’s a classification public health officials in Plumas and Butte counties have said they’re hoping to move toward, but what exactly does the word endemic mean? NSPR’s Sarah Bohannon recently posed that question to Lisa Almaguer, communications manager for the Butte County Public Health Department.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length

On when COVID-19 could be classified as endemic

I think the keyword here is eventually. Whether or not COVID will be called an endemic is yet to be seen. But we hope to get to that point where we treat COVID as we do other communicable diseases, such as influenza, and we respond with appropriate public health measures rather than constantly being in a state of emergency response. So a couple of interesting things to mention is that a disease that is present at expected levels is endemic – so things like influenza, West Nile virus – those are good examples. We expect them each year and so they're endemic. In Butte County, some years we have more than average numbers of cases. And at that point, we experience an epidemic of that disease. So you can have something — a virus or an illness — that's endemic and you can have years where they're at epidemic levels. So we're not quite there yet with COVID, to call it endemic. We still are in the middle of a surge. Yet another surge.

On the indicators public health is looking at to consider the virus endemic

I think that's still being determined, and so unfortunately, I don't feel that I have an appropriate answer for that. But as soon as we get those signs, as soon as we see more of a light at the end of the tunnel and following all of the health scientists and public health experts at the state and national level, then we'll have a better idea.

On what would change in the county if COVID-19 was classified as an endemic

For public health, if we are to reach an endemic situation with COVID-19 is more business as usual, right, like I mentioned, moving away from always being in a state of emergency response. So we currently have a COVID division that has been created over the last year, we did not have a division before. And so that division would probably work into the fold of the rest of our communicable disease work that we do. You know, we have all sorts of communicable diseases that we are working to prevent and monitoring all the time. Things like tuberculosis and measles and influenza, West Nile virus, so it would get wrapped into the fold with everything else.

On what reclassification would mean for how we should think about the virus

It would mean the same thing as it would for something like influenza season. We always put out messaging about how the public can keep themselves healthy and prevent getting sick and we would do the same thing for coronavirus, and we would encourage people to take prevention measures. And people will still continue to get sick, hospitalized, and die just as they do with influenza, but those numbers would very likely be much lower.

Sarah has worked at North State Public Radio since 2015 and is currently the station’s Director of Operations. She’s responsible for the sound of the station and works to create the richest public radio experience possible for NSPR listeners.