The most recent stage of the COVID-19 pandemic has been defined by the surge of the Omicron variant, a version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that is highly contagious yet seemingly not as likely to result in severe infection. Cases are now declining in most parts of the country—but yet the rate of infection is still as high as it has ever been pre-Omicron [editor’s note: host erroneously left out “pre-Omicron” in Intro to podcast]. So what is next? Is the risk now low enough to relax mask mandates and resume some sense of “normalcy”? Or should we expect more variants to emerge that will cause another surge? Is COVID-19 now endemic, and if so, what does that really mean? In this episode, hosts Bryan James and Ghassan Hamra discuss what we have learned from the Omicron surge and the transition to endemicity with Justin Lessler from the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and Cecile Viboud from the Fogarty International Center at the NIH.
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