Dr. Tony Holohan:

Quite a way, I would say. It is hard to measure it in time. It has entered into common language but it is really a technical epidemiological term. The features of this disease that we would expect would allow us to describe it as something that was endemic are where its patterns and behaviours were very predictable, we knew when it would surge, we knew when it would not, we knew the conditions that would make it surge and the interventions to take in response to those surges. It has not really begun to emerge yet in that way. We have seen surges of infection occurring at various different times of the year and that sort of pattern that, let us say, influenza might follow where we kind of know roughly when we expect to see peaks, when we expect to see troughs, what the thresholds to set might be to declare the flu season having commenced, etc. We are still not quite at the point, in terms of our global understanding of this disease, as to what its predictable behaviour will be. It is still a new infection. It is adapting to the host and learning new and better ways to transmit itself as between humans and, possibly, also animals.