Is the Covid-19 pandemic over? The answer is more art than science

Is the Covid-19 pandemic over?

President Biden told Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” it was. The Sunday night interview aired just days after the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the end may be in sight — though Tedros clearly didn’t mean it was days away when he predicted it.

But how confident can we be that the pandemic is or will soon be over? How can we know we’ve reached “over” when the disease we’ve been fighting isn’t going away?

Reaching the end of a pandemic is not like driving out of one county into the next. There is no fixed demarcation between a pandemic and post-pandemic period, especially for the first recorded pandemic caused by a coronavirus. It’s not like we know it’s over if cases drop to a certain level for a prescribed length of time.