Is COVID An Endemic Yet?

What does our trusty NPR say about this?

This NPR news story, with the title of “What’s Next for the Pandemic? Will COVID-19 Become Endemic Soon?” making it sound like it’s explaining if COVID is going into an endemic state talks nothing about an endemic. I listened to the whole story, and while I gained some very valuable insight as to why the world is afraid of COVID, I didn’t learn anything about COVID becoming an endemic, or what an endemic even is. I found that interesting, if not misleading. That’s what we’ve become accustomed to with the media these days, which is unfortunate indeed. Here are a few other interesting comments in this story:

• “Come March or April, our infections will be very low.”
• “For the everyday person, it is very hopeful that we can see a new normal happening, where people no longer feel a threat being in a public place. But I worry that we may see another variant that can put us back into a similar position that we saw with omicron.”
• “The good news is vaccine makers continue to work on vaccines that could target variants and offer broader infections. We also see the addition of antiviral medications…”
• “A friend of mine, who has two little ones under the age of 5, says life is just freezing, because her little ones can’t get the vaccines.”
• They later go on to explain that both Pfizer and Moderna have trials going on for kids ages 1-5, but Pfizer says they’re not seeing enough of an immune response with only the first two injections. They’re going to start testing a third dose to see if it has enough antibodies equivalent to adult levels.

In this post, I’m not going to go into all the details of my personal beliefs on any of the above, but I want to at least point to some science on what exactly is an endemic, and then maybe we can try to answer the question they failed at answering. I implore you to do your own research, so that you can be empowered to answer questions as they arise from your peers. The more educated you are, the more confident you’ll feel to raise your voice.

Endemic: A noun or adjective– Denoting a temporal pattern of disease occurrence in a population in which the disease occurs with predictable regularity with only relatively minor fluctuations in its frequency over time (1).

With this definition, and many of the others I found when researching, it does not seem that COVID is in endemic stage, mostly because it’s not AS predictable as the flu, for example, and it does seem to have pretty major fluctuations. With that being said, even Lord Fauci says we could be heading toward an endemic with COVID, as you can see here in this lovely NPR article. It really is increasingly difficult to trust any media, and even some of the “Scientists” when they contradict themselves so much.

I do want to point out that most of the major increases in infection are occurring in the fall and winter months, which actually does make it somewhat predictable (2). I don’t love sending you to NPR so much, but I did want to prove that you can look at the data that THEY provide, and still come to the logical conclusion that the masks and vaccinations are pretty useless against battling this pandemic. The nations with the highest vaccination rates and mask usage still have really high amounts of cases. It’s also super frustrating to note that the pretty eye-catching graphs I link below only show cases. We have to get over the amount of cases; they don’t have much relevance anymore. The important number to focus on is deaths, which you can see here. As you can see in this CDC data, comparing the spike in cases to the death rate in the window of the last month, while cases take a steep incline, the deaths decline.

We are not COVID-deniers by any means. We know that COVID is real–we had it in September, and it was definitely a weird illness, with strange symptoms. None of us got really sick, and none of us have any lasting issues, praise the Lord, but it certainly wasn’t fun. I also pray every day that deaths from COVID slow down, eventually ceasing, and that God’s hand of protection would be upon us. I pray God’s love and comfort would be on the families who have lost loved ones due to COVID.

Our issue with COVID is the amount of freedoms we’ve lost all in the name of “slowing the spread”. We’ve slowly seen our liberties being stripped away from us, and at first, some of our liberties were stripped away in a moment’s notice. It was unnerving, and it has led to way too much government power. So many of our freedoms that were lost have not been returned to us fully. It’ll be interesting how we recover from this as a nation and a world—not in the sense of our health, but in the sense of freedom.

If you’re so inclined to learn more about the truth of COVID, and to share some tea to chat about it with your friends, head over to our Kung Flu Crush tea. There’s tons of info on that page itself to read more about the idiocracy of this pandemic. If you’re already a fan of this tea, take a look at the tee that goes with it; it’s a fun one, sure to spark talk amongst your peers.

(1) https://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/endemic
(2) https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/30/822491838/coronavirus-world-map-tracking-the-spread-of-the-outbreak