Defining the New Endemic World

This is a few days late, but... plumbers, hot water...  Anyway:

It seems that there has been some high-level thinking regarding the end of the pandemic.  "High level" meaning government officials, not sterling quality thought.  AP reports that Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is calling for European authorities to begin shifting to a COVID maintenance process that would treat the disease as endemic rather than continuing to approach it as a pandemic:

The change would mean treating COVID-19 as an “endemic illness” rather than a pandemic, Sánchez said Monday, adding that deaths as a proportion of recorded cases have fallen dramatically since the initial onset of the pandemic.

“I believe that we have the conditions for, with precaution, slowly, opening the debate at the technical level and at the level of health professionals, but also at the European level, to start evaluating the evolution of this disease with different parameters than we have until now,” Sánchez told Cadena SER radio.

This is the kind of bureaucra-speak we'll be hearing more and more of, especially when/if the incidence of Omicron plateaus and begins to recede.  Whereas the clean end of the pandemic, which we lost the opportunity to experience when so many of us decided to opt out of the process for political reasons, would be obvious - just a few manageable pockets of infection remaining, worldwide - the move to an endemic relationship with COVID will require only a little less monitoring and regulation than we have now - forever.

So, the new world:  just like the old world, but more complicated - and more "hard work, illness and death"?