The United States is now “out of the pandemic phase” and is making a transition to COVID-19 becoming an endemic disease, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“We are certainly, right now, in this country, out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci said on PBS NewsHour Tuesday.
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Will COVID be eradicated?
“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. So, if you’re saying are we out of the pandemic phase in this country? We are,” Fauci says.
To his point, COVID-19 cases in the US have dramatically decreased over the past couple of months as the Omicron wave receded.
However, daily cases remain two times higher than they were for most of last summer, according to CNN.
Whatsmore, new cases are ticking back up in most states, and hospitalizations have started to rise over the past week too. Although fewer people are dying of COVID now than during most of the pandemic, there have still been more than 400 deaths a day over the past two months making COVID more deadly than most recent flu seasons.
The reality, Dr. Fauci says, is that COVID won’t be eradicated. However, the level of virus in society could be kept very low if people are intermittently vaccinated, possibly every year.
He clarified his statement to the Washington Post saying that unlike the “full-blown explosive pandemic phase” during the