What to know as the Covid-19 emergency ends

In the last several days, the U.S. government and the World Health Organizations have lifted emergency status declarations for the Covid-19 pandemic. Three years after the no-longer-novel coronavirus first surfaced, we can safely stop calling this a pandemic.

But it doesn’t mean we’re done with Covid. Because Covid is absolutely not done with us.

“The pandemic is probably over,” says Dr. Nancy Nielsen, senior associate dean for health policy at the University at Buffalo. “But it is now going to be a virus that we live with periodically. It’s going to be here for sure. Covid is not going anywhere.”

The pandemic is done, but Covid-19 is here to stay. How do we make sense of that? We spoke with a series of experts to find out.

So we can breathe a sigh of relief?

Well … yes. But don’t get complacent.

“The answer is mostly,” says Dr. Thomas Russo, the chief of infectious disease at UB’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. He adds a caveat: One of the reasons we’re likely in a particularly good spot now is the time of year. Mid-spring has us far enough from the much-higher winter transmission rates, and still distant from the hottest days of summer, when people in some states – particularly southern ones – tend to gather in the air-conditioned indoors.

When we do hit those spots on the calendar, we are still well-equipped to handle increased viral circulation. “We’ve got a pretty good immunity wall,” Russo said, noting that some of his fellow infectious disease experts estimate that only a tiny percent of the population – perhaps as low as 1% to 2% – have no immunity through vaccination or infection.

OK, let’s ask again: Is the pandemic REALLY over?

“I think that’s an easy one,” Russo says. “If most people define the pandemic as across the globe there’s a large number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, by that definition, the…