Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the likelihood of COVID-19 becoming endemic in the UK in the long term.
Total eradication of SARS-CoV-2 globally is unlikely. Elimination nationally - that is, bringing the number of locally acquired cases to zero - may be possible transiently but is highly unlikely to be possible permanently. Though other countries appear to have eliminated the virus locally, it is still early in the pandemic and the virus is very likely to reappear in these countries.