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As COVID-19 enters its fourth year, the disease appears to have become endemic in India. This means that the disease is still a pandemic at the global level — as it continues to infect more than half-a-million new cases daily across continents — but the risk of a new severe outbreak in India is negligible.
“In India, till mid-2022, there was a high chance that new COVID-19 patients, particularly those with partial or no vaccination shots, would develop moderate to severe forms of the disease,” said Chandrakant Lahariya, an epidemiologist and a physician who treats infectious diseases.
“Now, even though new cases are being reported, the share of Indians requiring hospitalisation has become almost negligible,” he added. The disease arguably has become endemic in most European countries as well.
Whether a disease has become endemic to a geographical region is dependent on a host of factors, including the population profile, natural infection rate, vaccination coverage and the efficacy of the vaccine used.
For instance, COVID-19 has not become endemic in China as the country has a low rate of natural immunity, used a vaccine with relatively lower efficacy and has a large unvaccinated elderly population, said Lahariya.
In the United States, the problem is low vaccine coverage due to its widespread anti-vaccination campaigns.
Read more: COVID-19 will now be an endemic pandemic
In 2022, the world recorded the highest number of COVID-19 cases since the beginning of the outbreak in 2020. A cumulative 651.76 million cases were reported globally till December 15, 2022, according to data website Our World in Data.
Of these, 56 per cent of the cases — or 363 million — were recorded in 2022 alone. Europe, North America, Asia and Oceania saw their highest ever share of cases in 2022.
At the same time, at least 107 countries saw the highest number of COVID-19 cases in a year in 2022. In 86 of these countries, the number of new cases in 2022 was higher than the combined caseload for 2020 and 2021.
In contrast, the year accounted for only 17.9 per cent of the 6.66 million deaths due to disease. Europe and America accounted for 64 per cent of the 1.2 million COVID-19 deaths in 2022.