As COVID-19 cases continue to decline the Fond du Lac County Public Health Officer says she wouldn’t be surprised if the virus becomes endemic this year. Kim Mueller was reacting to comments from the state’s top medical officer that COVID-19 likely will reach a stage in 2022 where numbers remain fairly constant. “I think that’s great news,” Mueller told WFDL news. “…news that we’ve been hoping for for quite a while here.” The term endemic is uses to describe a disease as a regular part of the population, such as the flu. “”We’re going on the third year of this (pandemic) and I don’t think anybody would have or could have anticipated how long this has stretched out,” Mueller said. Some medical experts maintain that COVID-19 will never become endemic because the disease will be driven by new variants that can evade vaccinations and infect swaths of unvaccinated people.