COVID-19 Pandemic Is Over, German Virologist Says: What Does This Mean?

The COVID-19 pandemic in Germany can be considered "over," according to one of the country's leading virus experts.

The coronavirus has become endemic, Christian Drosten, the head of virology at Berlin's Charité University Hospital, told the German newspaper Der Tagesspiegel.

It will hardly be able to get through to the summer as a result of the population's immunity becoming broad and resilient, he said.

"We are experiencing the first endemic wave with SARS-CoV-2 this winter; in my opinion, the pandemic is over," Drosten said, according to a machine translation of his comments. SARS-CoV-2 refers to the virus that causes COVID-19.

Intensive care physician Christian Karagiannidis, Drosten's colleague at the German federal government's coronavirus council of experts, for his part, said he believes the COVID-19 pandemic in the country will be over after winter.

"I firmly expect that the pandemic will now increasingly expire," Karagiannidis was quoted as saying by the outlet.

A pandemic is defined by the Encyclopedia Britannica as an outbreak of an infectious disease "that occurs over a wide geographical area and that is of high prevalence, generally affecting a significant proportion of the world's population, usually over the course of several months."

Meanwhile, a disease outbreak is considered endemic "when it is consistently present but limited to a particular region," according to the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

While Karagiannidis said that one or two small COVID-19 waves were still likely in the future, he noted that the immunity situation of the population was already solid enough that there were "significantly fewer" COVID-19 patients in intensive care units.

Additionally, Karagiannidis said he believes it is unlikely that another dangerous variant of COVID-19 will spread in Germany.

"We see that the number of serious illnesses is decreasing more and more. I don't think we'll see another setback," he said.

The vaccination campaign in Germany and Europe was the decisive factor that helped combat the coronavirus pandemic, according to Drosten.

Germany also imposed measures such as mandatory mask-wearing indoors and night curfews to counter the spread of COVID-19, but most of these have already been lifted.

"It was never about stopping the pandemic, it was clear from the start that this was not possible. But if nothing had been done, then in Germany in the waves up to [COVID's Delta variant] there would have been a million deaths or more. So you had to reduce contacts," Drosten, who defended the measures taken to contain the virus, said.

In response to Drosten's comments, German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann has reportedly called for all restrictive measures to be lifted.

Nearly 37.2 million COVID-19 cases and a total of 160,611 virus-related deaths have been recorded in Germany, according to data provided by the World Health Organization.