Two years into the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the Duterte administration has signaled the country’s “shift” from a “pandemic paradigm” to learning how to live with the virus in 2022.
“Our policy to safely reopen the economy has accelerated our recovery and moderated the impact of the pandemic on the poor,” Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua said in a press conference in December last year.
However, highlighting the “twin threats” of the Delta and Omicron virus variants now infecting the public, World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has cautioned that the virus will “continue to evolve and threaten our health systems if we don’t improve the collective response.”
Will the virus ever go away? When will the COVID-19 pandemic end?
VERA Files Fact Check spoke with an epidemiologist to answer these questions. Watch this video:
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Sources
World Health Organization, Timeline: WHO’s COVID-19 response
World Health Organization, WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard
Department of Health, Beat COVID-19 Media Forum, Nov. 22, 2021
Vox, How you’ll know when Covid-19 has gone from “pandemic” to “endemic”, Oct. 22, 2021
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Principles of Epidemiology | Lesson 1 – Section 11.
On the 1918 flu pandemic
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1918 Historical Image Gallery
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Questions and Answers | Pandemic Influenza (Flu)
- New England Journal of Medicine, The Persistent Legacy of the 1918 Influenza Virus, July 16, 2009
- Time, How did the 1918 Flu Pandemic End? Lessons for COVID-19
- History, Spanish Flu – Symptoms, How It Began & Ended
On the Delta variant
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Delta Variant: What We Know About the Science, Aug. 26, 2021
- U.S. National Institutes of Health, The reproductive number of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 is far higher compared to the ancestral SARS-CoV-2 virus, Oct. 11, 2021
- Meedan Health Desk, How contagious is the Delta variant compared to other infectious diseases?, Aug. 13, 2021
On the Omicron variant
- World Health Organization, Update on Omicron, Nov. 28, 2021
- World Health Organization, Enhancing response to Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant, Jan. 7, 2022
- University of Rochester Medical Center, Omicron is Spreading: Here’s What Our Scientists Know, Jan. 10, 2022
- Bloomberg, Omicron Four Times More Transmissible Than Delta in New Study, Dec. 9, 2021
- U.S. National Institutes of Health, Relative instantaneous reproduction number of Omicron SARS-CoV-2 variant with respect to the Delta variant in Denmark, Dec. 30, 2021
On government’s vaccination target
- CNN Philippines, PH misses COVID-19 vaccination target, to focus on protecting senior citizens, Dec. 31, 2021
- PhilStar.com, Government vax target: 77 million Pinoys by Q1, Dec. 25, 2021
- Philippine News Agency, Nearly 50M Filipinos already fully vaccinated, Jan. 3, 2022
Philippine Statistics Authority, 2021 First Semester Official Poverty Statistics Press Conference, Dec. 17, 2021
World Health Organization, Media briefing on COVID-19, Dec. 29, 2021
(Guided by the code of principles of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter, VERA Files tracks the false claims, flip-flops, misleading statements of public officials and figures, and debunks them with factual evidence. Find out more about this initiative and our methodology.)
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