New Delhi: It was in May this year that the WHO announced that Covid-19 may end up becoming endemic. This means Covid-19 might not go away for a long time as the novel coronavirus would continue to infect populations in a particular region. Now, with countries better adapted to manage the Covid-19 pandemic and reducing the fatality rate, the WHO`s prediction looks quite realistic. A pathogen is considered to have become endemic to a region when it regularly infects people but the rate of infection doesn`t change.

In India, the coronavirus pandemic is believed to have passed its peak in September. Some analysts have pointed out the same on the basis of the sero surveys conducted by the ICMR. Surveys published September showed that there could be 80-100 cases of undocumented coronavirus infection in India for every laboratory-confirmed case of Covid-19. Extrapolating this for the entire population of 138 crore in India, over 40 per cent of the population -- on the upper end -- could be infected by coronavirus. This is large enough a population share to bend the curve of a pandemic -- which, epidemiologist say, happens at 30 per cent herd immunity.

This is the phase of Covid-19 pandemic, when it can become endemic in parts of the country continuing to infect people at a certain rate. This situation may continue till the disease is eradicated through universal vaccination over the years. Two of the previous coronavirus infections attained that stage elsewhere. SARS, which broke out in 2002, has remained contained through control measures having resulted in only a few cases after 2004. Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which broke out in 2012, is now considered to have reached a low-level endemic status in some Middle-East countries. The rate of infection is predictable in those countries. However, Covid-19 could be a little different from SARS and MERS in the sense that it has spread to a larger global population and seen bigger territorial expanse. SARS and MERS showed greater severity in symptoms making the disease and its carrier easily known to health authorities and people.

Covid-19 spreads more easily through its asymptomatic patient-carriers. Asymptomatic spread of Covid-19 has been the biggest challenge for authorities and even lockdowns across the world have not been successful in stopping the virus`s progress -- possibly barring China. With Covid-19 vaccines on the horizon, SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a greater probability of entering the endemic phase and staying in that zone for quite some time. What might help Covid-19 enter endemic status is that there is no clarity about how the vaccine would behave in the longer run and how long or robust would be the immunity acquired through natural infection or one of the vaccines.

Since SARS-CoV-2 spread to all corners of the world within a few months of it being spotted in a business district of China, the threat remains of it again doing a fresh circle of the globe even if one person remains infected after vaccination. Universal vaccination would require more than 750 crore doses of a single-dose vaccine and 1,500 crore if it is a double-dose jab, provided the induced immunity is long-term one. In any case, a mask-free Covid-free world is still far away.

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