US is ‘out of the pandemic phase’ of Covid
The US is out of the pandemic phase of the coronavirus, according to the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, made the declaration on Tuesday, more than two years after the widespread Covid-19 outbreak.
PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff asked Fauci: ‘Here we are. It’s the end of April. It’s the spring of 2022. How close are we to the end of the pandemic?’
‘We are certainly, right now, in this country out of the pandemic phase,’ Fauci replied.
‘Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.’
Fauci then reiterated: ‘So, if you’re saying, are we out of the pandemic phase in this country, we are.’
However, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases warned that ‘we’re not going to eradicate this virus’.
Coronavirus cases have dropped dramatically in the last two months as the surge fueled by the Omicron variant has subsided. Still, cases are twice as high as they were for most of summer 2021, as the Omicron subvariant BA.2 continues to infect Americans.
Fauci early Wednesday told Washington Post that the US is now in the ‘control’ stage of the pandemic because Covid-19 is causing less deaths and hospitalizations than during the winter Omicron spike.
‘We’re really in a transitional phase, from a deceleration of the numbers into hopefully a more controlled phase and endemicity,’ Fauci told the newspaper.
Fauci had detailed five phases of the pandemic: the full-blown pandemic, deceleration, control in which the virus becomes endemic in the population, elimination and finally but unlikely, eradication.
More than 990,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the US and according to a New York Times estimate, the death count could hit 1million in a matter of a few weeks.
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