“Endemicity” is not a word that rolls off the vernacular tongue. Still, its new prominence in the halls of governments around the world is a huge ray of hope. It means that governments have at long last begun to regard the pathogen as potentially a manageable part of our world. The word endemic is a contrast to pandemic. A new virus of the sort we’ve been through moves from the pandemic stage to a manageable stage – and so it has been for all of history. And by manageable, epidemiologists do...
