When will the pandemic be over? And who decides that? Two experts have some answers.

Julie Swann, the department head and professor of the industrial and systems engineering department at North Carolina State University, currently leads a group of researchers selected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists to do projections and analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2009, Swann served at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a science advisor for the H1N1 pandemic response.

Matt Koci, professor in the poultry science department at NC State, is a virologist and immunologist whose work focuses on host-microbe interactions in birds.

Here, the two explain how we’ll know when the pandemic is at an end and what life might look like after that:

How will we know when the pandemic is over? And who gets to make that decision?

Julie Swann: Do you mean officially? I mean, a pandemic is when a disease is spreading across multiple countries globally, where resources are needed to avoid bad outcomes. So, we may never get rid of it in that sense.

There are a couple of important signals. In January 2020, the World Health Organization made a formal declaration of a “public health emergency of international concern.” The declaration is regularly reviewed and can be ended. This tells countries they need to invest resources to reduce the spread of a disease that is spreading internationally. So one signal would be if the WHO ended that declaration. However, I do not expect this for a while given the current spread worldwide and ongoing risk.

I am also watching for a declaration by the US Secretary of Health and Human Services that the formal Public Health Emergency has ended. This has been extended multiple times and currently is in effect until at least mid-April. This type of official declaration also has implications for telehealth, waivers, and flexibility for a number of stakeholders in the overall health system. If you define a pandemic as a disease that is prevalent across the entire world, with significant drains on health systems, then it may be a long time before we are truly past that stage, although the experience in some local areas may be different.

Matt Koci: There’s the technical definition and then there’s what we’re all experiencing. Don’t get me wrong, when we get to a point where the WHO says COVID isn’t a major issue in some parts of the world, that will be a good sign and one of the first steps towards everyone being able to put the worst part of COVID-19 behind us. However, we need to be careful and not over-interpret that news as the end of the struggle.

As Julie said, pandemic means an epidemic is happening everywhere on Earth. At some point in the future (hopefully sooner rather than later) large regions of a continent will no longer have COVID epidemic conditions, which will mean COVID doesn’t meet the pandemic definition. But that doesn’t mean things are better everywhere. A lot of people will still have a long way to go.

Read the full article about the end of the pandemic by Matt Shipman at Futurity.