 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. As COVID-19 peaks and troughs, there have been a number of questions on the future of the pandemic. Over the past few years, we have seen a number of predictions on beating the pandemic, many of which have been proven wrong. A different way of viewing the pandemic might be to analyze when do we stop worrying about it? What kind of conditions need to prevail before we can say we have reached such a situation? Is this achievable globally, or is it a local state? Immunologists Dr. Satyajit Rath explained. What we are seeing about the spread of Omkron is in line with what we've seen earlier. We've seen case numbers going up in local outbreaks, particularly as in the case of India in metropolitan cities. Indian numbers in major metropolitan cities like Mumbai or Delhi are going down. In other places, they're still going up. In other words, there isn't just a uniform wave going up and down. There are local outbreaks having their own projectories that are contributing to so-called national numbers. It's equally clear that the Omkron strain is going to slowly work its way through the world's communities over the coming weeks, not even months, but a few months at most. As the Omkron strain makes its way through, there are two or three points that we need to keep in mind that take us to the question of what next? The first issue is everybody is saying that the Omkron strain is milder than last year's strains or 2020 strains. And really, the evidence for that is not very good. So in the first place, being milder does not mean that everybody gets so-called symptomless infection. What everybody has meant is that in 2020, the then major strains of SARS-CoV-2 virus led to, let's say, about 10% of identified infected people landing in hospital and some fraction of them down. In 2021, with the Delta strains, this percentage of people landing in hospital went up not hugely, not to 50%, 60%, but from 10% to 13%, 14%, 15%. With Omkron, that percentage seems to have gone down. That means that the dominant characteristic is that people get relatively mild illness, but it is that some percent of infected people land up in hospital. And that's what we worry about, which brings us to the question of what next from a particular perspective. That perspective is a matter of when do we stop worrying about the pandemic? Everybody has been discussing issues of endemicity and when will we reach endemicity and what is endemicity? And rather than getting into technical, pedantic discussions of what endemicity is, it's useful to think about when we stop worrying about the pandemic. Because if the pandemic was of a virus, for example, that was new and therefore spread very rapidly amongst all of us because none of us had encountered that virus earlier, but that did not cause severe illness in anybody. We wouldn't even have noticed that there was a new virus. We would have simply treated it as an outbreak of cough and colds through the communities and nothing more than that, minor irritation at most. So it is severe illness that seems to be one major component of how we think that there is a pandemic. The other component of course, extremely rapid spread so that cases of severe illness, landing up in hospital, needing critical care, expand hugely and begin to put healthcare systems under strain. If we think about it in those terms, then there are two ways not mutually exclusive that will lead to us stopping worrying about the pandemic. One is that the rate of spread drops down and over prior to Omicron, we thought that we would be getting to that point slowly. Omicron spreads amongst vaccinated and or previously infected people quite easily and therefore the rate of spread of the Omicron strains, of the Omicron lineages is not terribly low as yet. So that's one aspect, but the other aspect is if like the Omicron strain, the virus changes the virus population, changes into a population that still spreads amongst infected people and just transmits amongst infected people, but because infected people are no longer completely susceptible naive to that virus, it does not cause severe illness as often as frequently as it might otherwise have or as previous strains have and that seems to be the case with Omicron, then our illness percentages will drop and as a consequence, we will stop worrying about it as an pandemic and at that stage, in practical terms, we will be treating the pandemic as having converted to endemicity for all practical purposes, definitions notwithstanding. This is going to be where we will end up in all likelihood. It is going to be local because different places, different communities, towns, cities, countries are going to arrive at this point at different types and it is still going to remain susceptible to the possible emergence of a new strain, perhaps from people who have not been vaccinated with equity and inclusiveness where the new variant for some odd reason does begin to cause severe illness even in previously vaccinated or infected people and even when that happens, we are going to have to worry about it over again. So this is going to be a somewhat unstable situation and this is why it matters that we learn the lessons at this juncture and the lessons are that we need monitoring, careful monitoring in public health from communities where illnesses can be monitored all the way to laboratories with state of our technologies where viruses can be sequenced very rapidly on scale. Number one, number two, a global coordination system because it is globally important for all of us to be inclusively involved and invested in this problem and its solutions. And number three, a non-profit globally inclusive rapid public health response for diagnostics, for vaccine design and even more for the public health infrastructure that effectively delivers the implementation of vaccination campaigns. All of these, it is important for us to remember, begin to be more and more crucial to keep in mind and to think about rather than forgetting about the pandemic as we begin to work our way through calendar year 2020 and the pandemic begins to receive.