If COVID becomes endemic, is that a good thing?

If you are anxiously waiting for this COVID-19 virus to evolve from epidemic to endemic, you might want to be careful what you wish for.

An epidemic is a disease where the number of cases in the community is usually large or unexpected (think COVID in its early Chinese phase in early 2020). A pandemic is a worldwide epidemic, on a much larger scale (COVID-19 was officially recognized by the WHO as a pandemic on  11 March 2020). As immunity to an epidemic or pandemic increases - through vaccination, widespread natural infection, and behaviour changes - a virus starts to lose impetus, and its ability to transmit gradually falls. This is what is meant by the transformation of an epidemic or pandemic into an endemic disease, like the common cold, influenza and HIV/AIDS.

But don't be fooled, endemicity does not mean that the virus is suddenly rendered harmless. There will still be new waves, there will still be new variants (some of which will be milder, and some of which may well be substantially more contagious and potentially more virulent), and there is an increasing likelihood of multiple re-infections. People will still be hospitalized, some of them will die, and some unknown proportion will develop "long COVID". There is also an argument that a the burden of an epidemic disease falls disproportionately on women, Blacks, the poor and other minorities. 

Over longer periods of time, the virus may evolve to become intrinsically less severe, it is hoped. But in the meantime, we will have to just "live with it", something that many people seem to see as a positive development, although I'm not so sure.