For the first time since early 2020, Australians are returning to near-to-normal lives, or as normal as life in a post-pandemic world will allow.
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National Cabinet has voted to remove the mandatory isolation period for those who test positive for COVID-19. Isolation will no longer be required for asymptomatic people who test positive after October 14, 2022.
The World Health Organisation has declared "the end is in sight", while US President Joe Biden proclaimed "the pandemic is over".
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But dare we believe it? Could it possibly be that the pandemic is in fact over?
Epidemiologist at Deakin University, Melbourne, Associate Professor Hassan Vally is cautious.
He told ACM the worst may conceivably be over, but the pandemic is far from finished.
Is the nightmare all over?
Australia has been seeing fewer cases than in January when the nation was seeing an overwhelming 100,000 cases on the rolling seven-day average.
In October, that average has been closer to just 5000 new cases.
"Over means different things to different people," Professor Vally said.
"Technically, the definition of the pandemic being over is when we've moved from the emergency response phase of responding to COVID-19 and we've switched over to treating COVID-19 in a more sustainable way and in a way that's more consistent with the way we respond to other infectious diseases and other respiratory diseases."
Managing the moment
Australia's chief medical officer, Professor Paul Kelly, said on September 30, 2022, that the nation is currently "in a very low community transmission phase of the pandemic", but warned, "we will almost certainly see future peaks of the virus into the future".
But low transmission does not always mean low risk, it's just a matter of lower exposure rates, according to Professor Vally.
You may have a smaller chance of coming into contact with the virus than you did during the peak in January, but the dangers posed by the virus, particularly to already at-risk people, have not diminished.
"We also hope that these [new variant] waves aren't game changes in in the sense that, you know, we keep on building our immunity as a population," Professor Vally said.
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"Hopefully the technology improves as well, we get better vaccines and we get better antiviral treatments that we keep understanding the SARS-CoV-2 virus better.
"We said we are in a very good position in Australia right now, but yeah, I don't think anyone's under any illusion that there aren't going to be other waves to deal with down the track."
Is COVID-19 like the flu now?
It's been the constant catch-cry used by many throughout the pandemic.
One day, COVID-19 will be 'just like the flu', in the sense there will be seasonal peaks and troughs as the need for constant hypervigilance loosens.
So are we at that point now? Is COVID-19 'just like the flu'?
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"There's certainly a seasonal component to COVID-19 and we certainly seem to be more vulnerable in the cooler months, but there are probably other drivers to COVID-19 as well," Professor Vally said.
"So I wouldn't go so far as to say that it will definitely become only seasonal in the next few years, but you know, I guess given what we know about other coronaviruses and other respiratory infections perhaps down the track, that's probably what will happen or that's one of the possibilities."
Is COVID-19 an endemic virus now?
Back in February 2022, then-Health Minister Greg Hunt declared "the fact that the pandemic is endemic", which well and truly had the nation excited.
Disease outbreaks tend to be classed into three separate categories, depending on their relative severity: Endemic, epidemic, and pandemic.
A pandemic affects the entire world. COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation on March 11, 2020.
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An epidemic occurs when a disease becomes widespread across several nations, affecting large majorities of those nations.
An endemic virus is the result of a cluster of cases in any geographical area. It is when the disease is known to be constantly or seasonally circulating through a specific area.
Professor Vally told ACM we are still some way off describing COVID-19 as endemic.
"Endemic implies a lot of things that we don't quite have yet, so, you know, endemic implies that we've got a constant level of disease or the level of disease that we see is very predictable, and we're certainly nowhere near that yet," Professor Vally said.
It's unlikely the world will be able to see the finish line approaching, Professor Vally said.
Instead, we'll know we've reached the end once we cross the finish line and not before.
"It'll be something that we are able to reflect on when we look in the rearview mirror and understand the point when we [started] treat[ing] COVID-19 like another respiratory disease and where the pattern of infections was predictable and they stayed that way," Professor Vally said.
"I mean, the risk is we have another game-changing variant around the corner and we can't see into the future."