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How epidemics end

As COVID‐19 drags on and new vaccines promise widespread immunity, the world's attention has turned to predicting how the present pandemic will end. How do societies know when an epidemic is over and normal life can resume? What criteria and markers indicate such an end? Who has the insight, au...

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Autores principales: Charters, Erica, Heitman, Kristin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8014506/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33821019
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12370
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author Charters, Erica
Heitman, Kristin
author_facet Charters, Erica
Heitman, Kristin
author_sort Charters, Erica
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description As COVID‐19 drags on and new vaccines promise widespread immunity, the world's attention has turned to predicting how the present pandemic will end. How do societies know when an epidemic is over and normal life can resume? What criteria and markers indicate such an end? Who has the insight, authority, and credibility to decipher these signs? Detailed research on past epidemics has demonstrated that they do not end suddenly; indeed, only rarely do the diseases in question actually end. This article examines the ways in which scholars have identified and described the end stages of previous epidemics, pointing out that significantly less attention has been paid to these periods than to origins and climaxes. Analysis of the ends of epidemics illustrates that epidemics are as much social, political, and economic events as they are biological; the “end,” therefore, is as much a process of social and political negotiation as it is biomedical. Equally important, epidemics end at different times for different groups, both within one society and across regions. Multidisciplinary research into how epidemics end reveals how the end of an epidemic shifts according to perspective, whether temporal, geographic, or methodological. A multidisciplinary analysis of how epidemics end suggests that epidemics should therefore be framed not as linear narratives—from outbreak to intervention to termination—but within cycles of disease and with a multiplicity of endings.
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spelling pubmed-80145062021-04-01 How epidemics end Charters, Erica Heitman, Kristin Centaurus Historiographical Article As COVID‐19 drags on and new vaccines promise widespread immunity, the world's attention has turned to predicting how the present pandemic will end. How do societies know when an epidemic is over and normal life can resume? What criteria and markers indicate such an end? Who has the insight, authority, and credibility to decipher these signs? Detailed research on past epidemics has demonstrated that they do not end suddenly; indeed, only rarely do the diseases in question actually end. This article examines the ways in which scholars have identified and described the end stages of previous epidemics, pointing out that significantly less attention has been paid to these periods than to origins and climaxes. Analysis of the ends of epidemics illustrates that epidemics are as much social, political, and economic events as they are biological; the “end,” therefore, is as much a process of social and political negotiation as it is biomedical. Equally important, epidemics end at different times for different groups, both within one society and across regions. Multidisciplinary research into how epidemics end reveals how the end of an epidemic shifts according to perspective, whether temporal, geographic, or methodological. A multidisciplinary analysis of how epidemics end suggests that epidemics should therefore be framed not as linear narratives—from outbreak to intervention to termination—but within cycles of disease and with a multiplicity of endings. Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2021-02-22 2021-02 /pmc/articles/PMC8014506/ /pubmed/33821019 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12370 Text en © 2021 The Authors. Centaurus published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Historiographical Article
Charters, Erica
Heitman, Kristin
How epidemics end
title How epidemics end
title_full How epidemics end
title_fullStr How epidemics end
title_full_unstemmed How epidemics end
title_short How epidemics end
title_sort how epidemics end
topic Historiographical Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8014506/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33821019
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1600-0498.12370
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