Marking two years since the World Health Organization (WHO) first described COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, experts say there is no going back to what was once considered normal before the virus appeared.
As provinces move to ease public health measures, infectious disease expert Dr. Isaac Bogoch told CTV's Your Morning on Friday it is important to remember that the pandemic is not over and more variants will arise in the future.
"COVID is not going anywhere. It's here and it's going to be here for a long, long, long time. We will see more waves of this, we absolutely will. The real question here is to what extent will those waves impact us?" Bogoch said.
While the past Omicron wave was "terrible," Bogoch said the country is "in a much better place right now than where we were a month and two months ago when our hospitals were full."
However, as more people became infected with the virus during this past wave than in any surge prior, Bogoch said he is hopeful future waves won't cause as major disruptions to daily life like previous ones, due to increased immunity within communities.
"So many people have been vaccinated, so many people have been infected and recovered, so many people have been vaccinated and been infected and recovered, and through all of that, hopefully subsequent waves of this won't impact us as significantly," he said.
When it comes to "living with the virus," Bogoch said that can mean different things to different people.
"To some people it means just putting your head in the sand and ignoring that this virus [does] exist and trying to pretend like we're in a 2018 and 2019 world," he said.
Bogoch said that the past two years have shown that is not possible.
He said that living with COVID-19, to him, means having necessary supports in place to successfully manage future waves of infections from a public health perspective, with little impact to daily life.
He said this includes creating safer indoor spaces with proper air filtration, putting resources in areas that are disproportionately impacted by the virus, such as lower-income and racialized neighbourhoods, improving access to care, ensuring there is equitable access to therapeutic treatments, acknowledging that there's vulnerable people who might get really sick, and keeping up vaccination efforts.
"There's a lot that we can do to 'live with the virus' and have the virus impact us in a minimal manner, rather than getting throttled by this wave after wave after wave," Bogoch said.
While it has been a "tough two years" for health-care workers and Canadians, Bogoch said the country has "done OK" compared to other countries in handling the pandemic. However, he said it is not over yet.
"Fingers crossed that this really truly does wind down, and we have the tools to keep this at bay and we do keep this at bay, so that we're all safe and we can focus our attention on other important aspects," Bogoch said.
According to data collected by the WHO, more than 450 million people have contracted SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, since the start of the pandemic, and over six million people have died as of Friday.
In Canada, more than 3.3 million people have become infected and over 37,000 Canadians have died from the disease, according to CTVNews.ca's case tracker.
MOVING TO THE NEXT PHASE
Infection disease expert Dr. Abdu Sharkawy told CTV News Channel on Friday there are many lessons to be learned from the past two years. The most important of those, he said, is being patient and keeping an open mind as scientists and experts work to understand what is still a new and complex disease.
"I think this has been a test of unity and… unfortunately, whether it's vaccine hesitancy or masks being politicized, there's been a lot of polarizing of opinions and a lot of labeling, and that's created barriers, and it's prevented everyone in our society from pulling on the rope in the same direction," Sharkawy said.
Sharkawy said it is also important to remember that "it's us against the virus," and fighting amongst one another only drags the pandemic out longer.
"We have to support each other, we have to support the vulnerable, we have to be more giving to one another – and if we can do that and be more patient, then we can stave off some more catastrophic future pandemics," he said.
If society does not learn those lessons, Sharkawy said the world will "unfortunately" see more disruptive pandemics in the future that may be harder to tackle.
Sharkawy said COVID-19 is "clearly going to become endemic" and said he believes it will likely take on a seasonal nature, like that of the flu, as more Canadians develop immunity.
However, he said he does not want to get his hopes up "too high."
"I think we have to be very careful and learn the lesson that variants emerged because we weren't careful enough, because we let our guard down too quickly… because of fatigue, because of our own political beliefs… and the virus doesn't care about that," Sharkawy said.
In protecting the public and our heath system moving forward, Sharkawy said Canadians need to stand together while governing bodies need to improve infrastructure such as ventilation standards, as well as address the "inequities and systemic determinants of health that are underpinning why a lot of people suffer disproportionately" in crises.
"If we do all of those things, we're going to be in much better shape," he said.
Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti, an infectious diseases physician at Trillium Health Partners, told CTV News Channel on Friday that the world has "come a long way" since the pandemic was declared two years ago.
He credits the development of COVID-19 vaccines for the recent easing of public health measures, calling them a "game changer."
"Now of course, the vaccine is not perfect. The virus is not gone, but compared to the situation we were in two years ago… we're moving into what I have been terming the next phase of the pandemic where we're out of that major emergency," Chakrabarti said.
Most notable of this next phase is the removal of proof of vaccination systems and mask requirements across much of the country, and elsewhere. Some experts have said the move is premature, however, Chakrabarti says Canada is "ready" for this next step and it is the "right time" to move foreword.
"Just to reassure people -- because I know many are still nervous -- we're not the first jurisdiction to do this. Many have done it before us and many are doing just fine in this new phase," he said.
Despite this, Chakrabarti said the virus will still play a major role in the daily lives of infectious disease experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists, but hopes it will no longer need to be the "centre of attention" for everyone else.
"There's lots of trepidation, but once we start to reconnect with our friends and family... I think it's going to be much better than a lot of us expect," he said.
