section_path: Transition to later phases
section_name: Transition to later phases
paragraph_text: Transition to later phases
  
  A March 2022 review declared a transition to endemic status to be "inevitable". In June 2022, an article in Human Genomics said that the pandemic was still "raging", but that "now is the time to explore the transition from the pandemic to the endemic phase". Another review that month predicted that the virus that causes COVID-19 would become the fifth endemic seasonal coronavirus, alongside four other human coronaviruses.
  
  A February 2023 review of the four common cold coronaviruses concluded that the virus would become seasonal and, like the common cold, cause less severe disease for most people. Another 2023 review stated that the transition to endemic COVID-19 may take years or decades.
  
  On 5 May 2023, the WHO declared that the pandemic was no longer a public health emergency of international concern. This led several media outlets to incorrectly report that this meant the pandemic was "over". The WHO commented to Full Fact that it was unlikely to declare the pandemic over "in the near future" and mentioned cholera, which it considers to have been a pandemic since 1961 (i.e., continuously for the last 64 years). The WHO does not have an official category for pandemics or make declarations of when pandemics start or end.
  
  In June 2023, Hans Kluge, director of the WHO in Europe, commented that "While the international public health emergency may have ended, the pandemic certainly has not". The WHO in Europe launched a transition plan to manage the public health response to COVID-19 in the coming years and prepare for possible future emergencies.
  
  Epidemics and pandemics usually end when the disease becomes endemic, and when the disease becomes "an accepted, manageable part of normal life in a given society". As of March 2024, there was no widely agreed definition of when a disease is or is not a pandemic, though efforts at a formal definition were underway. Experts asked by Time that month noted that COVID-19 continued to circulate and cause disease, but expressed uncertainty as to whether it should still be described as a pandemic.