Talk:Endemic COVID-19

Providing context

I had previously added this information, citing a source already being used in the article:

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Not all infectious diseases become endemic. Common infectious disease patterns include:

• Disease eradication – an unlikely outcome for COVID-19
• Sporadic spread – unpredictable outbreaks that tend to die out relatively quickly
• Local or regional spread – unpredictable outbreaks, or epidemics, that are sustained for a significant period of time in local or regional areas, without global spread
• Pandemic – global outbreaks
• Endemic – steady, predictable infection levels, including seasonal patterns.

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I think, if you want people to understand what an endemic disease is, it is important to understand what it's not. This is not unusual in medicine-related articles. For example, the second sentence of Cancer provides information on what cancer is not.

Crossroads has removed it, saying "This is way beyond what that source says, and even if not, it is excessive use of a lower quality "world view" article. It's also undue emphasis on outcomes that do not apply to Covid, the topic of this article."

Taking the concerns in order:

• I don't think it goes beyond what the source says (at all, much less "way beyond"). Did you get access to the source again? I was actually a little concerned when I was writing this that I was getting too close to the line for Wikipedia:Plagiarism.
  Perhaps more importantly, this is basic information in epidemiology. These definitions can be found in textbooks such as this one, this one, this one, chapter 4 in this one, with little variation beyond whether the author prefers to call unpredictable outbreak below the global level local/regional spread or an epidemic, with both labels being understood to mean the same thing. The advantage to the cited source is (a) it's already used in the article and (b) it explicitly connects these basic definitions to COVID-19. The first book I link in this paragraph also explicitly connects these concepts to COVID-19. Perhaps you'd prefer that one? Or if you want something more accessible to the average person, Bill Gates' book about COVID-19, says in its early pages that "A good rule of thumb is that an outbreak is when a disease spikes in a local area, an epidemic is when an outbreak spreads more broadly within a country or region, and a pandemic is when an epidemic goes global, affecting more than one continent. And some diseases don’t come and go, but stay consistently in a specific location—those are known as endemic diseases. Malaria, for instance, is endemic to many equatorial regions."
• If you are concerned about these undisputed facts being followed by a "lower quality" source, then I've just provided multiple textbooks that contain the same basic information, so that problem is easily solved.
• I wonder why you believe that these are "outcomes that do not apply to Covid". We actually don't know whether COVID-19 will become endemic (=steady rate) or a series of epidemics (=variable rate) or something else. Obviously, the "pandemic" item applies, because that's either what we have now or what we hopefully have finally stopped having. It is unlikely to be eradicated or sporadic (though this source says that New Zealand and Thailand achieved the enviable state of sporadic transmission in the early days), but I think the main point is that knowing what endemic is not helps people understand what it actually is. You can't really understand endemic (=like malaria) if you don't understand sporadic (=like gastroenteritis) and epidemic (=like measles). It is, consequently, appropriate to include information about contrasting disease prevalence states, because that helps people understand the contours of the main subject here. Or, to put it another way, how can you know what "endemic COVID-19" is, if you don't know what both "endemic" and "COVID-19" are? You don't actually know what endemic COVID-19 is unless you also know that it's different from pandemic COVID-19, different from epidemic COVID-19, etc. Therefore we need to provide enough information about what endemicity is, that we can comply with the rule that "Each article on Wikipedia must be able to stand alone as a self-contained unit". Readers should not have to go to a different article to find out what this one is actually about. Also, lots of sources (here's another book and another) provide this kind of compare-and-contrast information, so it's a normal way for sources to present this information.

I therefore suggest that this information be returned to the article, perhaps with additional sources.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Here's another source, PMID 35771775 (review from a year ago), saying We distinguish between 4 possible paths of an emerging pathogen, including “sporadic spread,” “local or regional spread,” “pandemicity,” and “endemicity.” They predict endemicity: We contend that endemicity is the most plausible route for SARS-CoV-2 in the foreseeable future, with SARS-CoV-2 poised to eventually become the fifth endemic seasonal coronavirus (HCoV) along with HKU1, NL63, OC43, and 229E and suggest that age distribution is a good way to detect when COVID-19 has transitioned from pandemic to endemic. (They decline to predict how long this will take, but they most of the timespans they give as examples are a couple of years.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:08, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, I liked it. More scholarly sourcing for this article is what is needed. Bon courage (talk) 03:16, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I'm happy for you to add something from e.g. PMID 35771775, and I think using it to explain possible paths and their predictions are a good use of it, but I stand by my edit summary earlier for that particular material. Nobody thinks sporadic-spread is going to happen again for Covid, it only happened in a few places with strict border controls and on-and-off lockdowns as part of a now-defunct "zero COVID" policy and prior to the rise of more transmissible variants. Mentioning such possibilities in the article as though they are still plausible can be misleading. I also don't think "like malaria" is at all a helpful comparison for this particular virus; it's not a comparison we see expert sources really making, rather they make comparisons to other respiratory viruses like the flu and the other four endemic coronaviruses. That said, bottom line is that I think we should move on from trying to bleed dry that one particular "world view" article, and that we will benefit from using better sources as mentioned, and including what is actually predicted for Covid specifically. Crossroads ^-talk- 23:11, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I wrote "Common infectious disease patterns include:" which is not at all like "maybe sporadic-spread could happen again for Covid".

The particular diseases given for comparison depends on which part of the world the speaker comes from, and also whether the speaker prefers an especially strict definition of endemicity. There's a POV in the field that says the common cold and influenza is too variable to be endemic. Also, even if you believe influenza is endemic, it is at best only sometimes endemic. Pandemic and epidemic flu are real, too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:23, 25 May 2023 (UTC)

Long Covid

The Lancet talked about "a pandemic of Long COVID", but this is a metaphorical use of the term pandemic, and I think that is unnecessarily confusing for this article. Consequently, I've removed it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:20, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

I support this. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:30, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Navbox

The sidebar navbox lists endemic COVID as a type of "international response", which is kind of silly. (Endemicity is a situation that either happens or doesn't.) I'm not sure that there's a good section for it, though. Maybe "variants"? (A mutation could push us into endemicity, or out of it.) Or at the top? Or something else? WhatamIdoing (talk) 09:47, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

Over time

So... we have a section that amounts to a chronological proseline of changing expert opinions: "A March 2022 review declared... A June 2022 review predicted that... In October 2022, a report [...] assessed that... As of March 2023, it was not possible to predict..."

It previously began with a rather bland introductory statement, "The view of experts developed over time, as more information became available." @Crossroads removed it, saying that it was unsourced and probably something made up by Wikipedia editors for which we could not expect to find any published reliable source. For myself, I consider it amply verified by the sentences that follow it – the equivalent of "COVID-19 has a variety of symptoms" followed by a list of a variety of symptoms. I also assume Crossroads didn't attempt to find a source.

This section needs an introductory statement so that readers know what to expect in this section. Dumping an unlabeled list of events on readers with no explanation is both bad writing style and unencyclopedic. What can we add to this paragraph that will tell readers what to expect from this section? WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:38, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Deleting or changing the article entire structure

This article was written in a time when endemic management of COVID-19 was a future idea. Now all countries, bar a fraction tiny dependencies and pacific island countries, around the world manage Covid in an endemic way. That is different country to country but politicians and health officials all refer to their current management as 'living with Covid' or 'endemic management.' The drafts of this article I have as a past/present tense instead of a future tense feel silly. I believe the best course of action is either deleting this article or re-writing it entirely as a historic article, talking about early failed attempts to 'live with Covid', and how countries manage Covid nowdays. Pending discussion I've tried to update the article. AndrewRG10 (talk) 01:22, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

@AndrewRG10, I wonder if you could explain your ideas about what difference (if any) there is between saying "Covid is endemic" vs "Covid is being managed as if it were endemic". WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:15, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Government managing a disease like an endemic doesn't mean the disease is endemic. Managing a disease as if it were endemic can be seen with diseases like common cold and influenza that are universally recognised as endemic. Their management is no more than just government guidelines and promotion, free vaccinations for at risk people and educating on good hand hygiene. But lets say in first half of 2021, it's universally acknowledged Covid was still a pandemic but some countries tried to manage the disease in the same way as their endemic diseases. AndrewRG10 (talk) 02:35, 29 July 2023 (UTC)