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.

中文翻译：

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 流行病如何结束


随着 COVID-19 的持续蔓延和新疫苗有望带来广泛的免疫力，世界的注意力已转向预测当前的大流行将如何结束。社会如何知道流行病何时结束、正常生活何时可以恢复？什么标准和标志表明这样的结局？谁有洞察力、权威和可信度来破译这些迹象？对过去流行病的详细研究表明，它们不会突然结束；事实上，所讨论的疾病很少能真正结束。本文探讨了学者们识别和描述以往流行病结束阶段的方式，指出对这些时期的关注远少于对起源和高潮的关注。对流行病终结的分析表明，流行病既是生物学事件，也是社会、政治和经济事件。因此，“终结”既是生物医学的过程，也是社会和政治谈判的过程。同样重要的是，对于同一社会内和不同地区的不同群体来说，流行病结束的时间不同。对流行病如何结束的多学科研究揭示了流行病的结束如何根据时间、地理或方法论的角度而变化。对流行病如何结束的多学科分析表明，流行病不应被视为线性叙述（从爆发到干预再到终止），而是在疾病周期内并具有多种结局。