As the pandemic advances and the prevailing mutations appear milder in terms of symptoms, researchers tend to discuss the virus’s new, endemic phase. Vaccinations and the availability of antiviral medications have prompted a number of governments to relax anti-coronavirus policies, including the withdrawal of vaccination certificates from public view.

While the global medical community is optimistic about the coronavirus’s future, the American magazine “The Atlantic” publishes an article titled “Are We in the Middle of an Invisible COVID Wave?”

Yasmin Tayag, a columnist, explains that the tests to identify if someone has Covid-19 have changed in recent months. This is because many people self-test at home and do not report a positive result, therefore the exact number of instances is unknown.

“This means that our data could be missing a whole lot of infections across the country—enough to obscure a large surge. So … are we in the middle of an invisible wave? I posed the question to experts, and even they were stumped by what’s really happening in the U.S..”

The author goes on to say that while at the beginning of the pandemic it was not difficult to identify coronavirus waves due to PCR tests and hospitalizations, things are no longer so clear.

The columnist also explains that a wave may be invisible because the cases only show the number of people who test positive, but this is different from what epidemiologists want to know about the number of infections in the general population.

The numbers, as the columnist writes, are becoming vaguer and vaguer given the many tests that people get at home.

At the same time, the great familiarity with the virus can lead, as mentioned in the article, to a series of people ignoring its symptoms, while those who have been infected in the past may have such mild symptoms that they do not even recognize the problem of the disease.

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