A Socially Critical Disease

Denmark has taken half a step into the new world, but a very different half than Thailand has taken:

Denmark took the European Union lead Tuesday by scrapping most pandemic restrictions as the Scandinavian country no longer considers COVID-19 “a socially critical disease.”

"No longer... a socially critical disease."  Is this the new criteria for the end of the pandemic?  If so, I suppose it would work better if we knew what it meant.  It strikes me that none of us would predict that Denmark would be vague, while Thailand would be precise.

At any rate, the media, at least, is starting to talk about lifting mitigating restrictions as the signal that the end is near.  The article about Denmark lists half a dozen European countries which have eliminated, or will shortly eliminate, all restrictions, without suggesting that they have announced the coming of the new world.  And all this in the midst of a surge, although:

Officials say the reason for the Danish move is that while the omicron variant is surging in the country, it’s not placing a heavy burden on the health system and Denmark has a high vaccination rate... The head of the Danish Health Authority, Søren Brostrøm, told Danish broadcaster TV2 that his attention was on the number of people in ICUs rather than on the number of infections. He said that number had “fallen and fallen and is incredibly low.”

Once again, one of the foundations of the new world is "a high vaccination rate," which means that many (most?) countries - oh, take the US as an example - are far from the sight of land.