DR TIM ALLISON: Covid endemic may not be as dramatic but it’s still serious
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Worldwide conflict and tragedy are often used as the background for feature films, although there are relatively few big screen films about disease.
There is Outbreak; Contagion; The Andromeda Strain; and Pandemic. Some films are more realistic than others, but they do tend to present pandemics as more dramatic than real life and, like most war films, tend to play down the individual grief and suffering of those affected.
I wish that I could be like Dustin Hoffman capturing a monkey that then enabled me to create a drug that would save a town from the dreaded outbreak. Sadly, for my ambition to be like Dustin Hoffman, real life is not like that.
Combating pandemics and outbreaks is rarely exciting and needs hard work and dedication. Creating new drugs and vaccines does take a degree of inspiration but needs far more perspiration.
Presumably that is one of the reasons why pandemic movies are relatively rare.
Films about pandemics are not very common, but I have never come across a film called Endemic. I can hardly imagine a film called The Endemic Disease with the strap line: It’s still here, just not as common.
When a disease becomes endemic it is circulating in the community, but not at epidemic or pandemic levels. As well as being absent from the cinema, endemic diseases do not tend to hit the headlines.
But that doesn’t mean that endemic diseases are harmless.
People talk about Covid becoming endemic, but that means that the disease will still be here and for any individual catching Covid it can still mean potentially serious illness.
Face coverings and testing may be largely departing from our lives but what protects us from other endemic diseases can protect us from endemic Covid. Top of the list is vaccination.
We have had high levels of vaccination across local communities with some of the highest rates in Scotland. There is still work to do with vaccines though since we have spring boosters for people most vulnerable and a new programme of Covid vaccination available for all children aged five to 11.
Some of the arrangements for vaccination clinics have not suited everybody and some mistakes have been made with appointments; NHS Highland is working to improve that.
We do need a good number of parents and children coming forward for vaccination.
Getting high levels of vaccine coverage in all age groups is important for controlling Covid – both now and in the future.
I have written before about Covid rates falling, when it seemed that we were moving back to more of what life was like before the pandemic, only to see rates go up again.
I would not be surprised at all to see further waves of Covid over the next year. The virus will continue to challenge us whether it is endemic or pandemic.
Dr Tim Allison is NHS Highland’s director of public health and policy.
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