Is the world ready to follow Europe's footsteps and treat Covid like flu?

After 2 years of curfews, lockdown, mask mandates and movement restrictions, one question that arose several times is if the world is ready to take a step ahead and consider Covid an endemic?

New Delhi: Call it ‘getting back to normal' or entering into a new era of the Covid-19 pandemic, but several countries, especially in the West, are moving towards accepting the coronavirus spread as an endemic and have begun treating it as mere flu. Spain is the recent case in point.

After 2 years of curfews, lockdown, mask mandates and movement restrictions, the question arose several times if the world is really ready to take a step ahead and treat Covid like flu. However, the health experts in India and across warn strictly against dropping the guards against coronavirus as it is an ever-changing virus.

So are we really ready to treat Covid like flu? Here is an analysis of what global health bodies and various governments are saying about the ‘endemic stage’ of the coronavirus pandemic stage.