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Someone with a better clinical understanding than I do can probably shed more light on this, but the NZ Director General of Health briefly touched on this, saying there is a difference between elimination and eradication in medical lingo. That may also apply to the Lancet article. I’ll try to find more later if no-one else answers this better.

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That's right, and there was a brief controversy here when the Director General and the Prime Minister said that NZ had eliminated COVID and that was taken by most people to mean that it no longer existed here. They later had to backtrack somewhat and explain the difference.

Basically elimination means that the disease is totally under control, and any new cases can be dealt with via testing and tracing. Eradication means that the disease is completely wiped out and no longer exists here.

Elimination means removal of something. Eradication means it will never come back. So maybe they meant (or should have meant) that the risk of exponential spread has been eliminated.

Correct. The US has "eliminated" measles (since there are almost no cases and it's not difficult to contain), but the world has "eradicated" small pox (since the virus itself literally only exists in a couple of research labs in the entire world).

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