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of getting everyone, aged 5 yrs and up, vaccinated (which, btw, addresses Baron's question of why the Biden admin - and all but two FDA panel members - favored vaccinating kids)...better yet, read the whole article...it takes less time than what you've already wasted here on this thread by avoiding that simple task ;-).

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For now, “we have to remember that we are still in a pandemic with this virus,” said Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “We’re not yet at a point where we’re living with endemic Covid. When we get to that point some of this will be much easier, but we’re not there.”

“A disease is endemic if the reproductive number is stably at one. That means one infected person, on average, infects one other person,” explained Boston University epidemiologist Eleanor Murray. “Right now, we are nowhere near that. Each person who’s infected is infecting more than one person.”

In general, a virus becomes endemic when we — health experts, governmental bodies, and the public — collectively decide that we’re okay with accepting the level of impact the virus has. And obviously, that’s a tricky thing: People will differ as to what constitutes an acceptable level.

There’s one imminent development that makes Murray hopeful about the pandemic phase winding down in the US by 2022: Vaccines for 5- to 11-year-olds are expected to be approved within weeks. “I think once we have vaccines for all ages, I’m a lot more hopeful about the control situation in the US,” she said. Vaccinating school-going kids is crucial both because it’ll protect them and because it’ll limit spread in the community.

As we move toward endemicity, we can expect to watch this process happen in reverse, experts told me.

First, we’ll likely see individual states declaring an end to the emergency (some states already have). This will be staggered. Some areas, notably those with high vaccination rates, will reach a reasonable approximation of endemicity sooner than others.

On a national level, “the CDC may pull back our state of emergency in the US if cases remain low at some point in the future,” said Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University.

“But we still have a long way to go in controlling the virus around the globe,” she added. “A pandemic by nature is global, and while we’re doing better in the US and other wealthy countries, vaccine availability in many low- and middle-income countries has been atrocious.”

The WHO will eventually declare an end to the global pandemic, just like it’s done in the past for, say, the H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic. You just shouldn’t expect to hear the WHO’s declaration anytime soon.

If you live in the US, “it’s certainly possible” your region will be reasonably classed as being in the endemic phase in 2022, Petrie said. When the time comes, your state health department and local officials will likely make an announcement, based partly on the virus’s objective reproductive number and partly on the more subjective criteria above.

And until then? Rather than thinking of endemicity as an on-off switch next year, plan to think of it as a dimmer switch, Petrie told me. He plans to keep an eye on the CDC’s county data tracker to monitor local transmission levels. When his county is no longer in the red zone, he’ll start to feel more comfortable doing more public activities. We all have different levels of risk tolerance, so, for a while yet, we’ll be making our own subjective choices about which thresholds feel safe enough.

“As we’re transitioning to a more endemic level,” he said, “I think adjusting your behavior based on what’s happening locally makes a lot of sense.”

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Meanwhile, carry on with your political fantasies...