President Biden's chief medical adviser, Anthony S. Fauci, said Wednesday (April 27) that the United States is finally "out of the phase of a full-blown pandemic" and is now in the "transition to a more controlled endemic disease."
Fauci told The Washington Post: "We are really in a transition phase, slowing down from case growth to a more controllable and endemic phase. ”
The day before Fauci made the remarks, he told PBS's News Hour program that he believed the U.S. was "out of the pandemic stage." On Wednesday, he further clarified and clarified the point, making it clear that the pandemic is not over and that COVID-19 infections in the United States are still likely to increase, but will no longer lead to hospitalizations and deaths like previous waves of infections.
"Right now we're at a low enough level that I think we're transitioning to endemic diseases... We are not in the phase of a full-blown pandemic, and that does not mean that the pandemic is over. A pandemic means widespread infection worldwide. In our country, we are transitioning to a more controlled endemic phase," Fauci said.
Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said Wednesday that the reality has also changed subtly everywhere, with local health officials now refocusing on non-COVID-19 areas such as maternal health, child immunization, tuberculosis, HIV and other public health problems.
"I think there is a subtle shift in the health sector at the local level to normalize the pandemic response and enable them to return to the core of the public health sector," Freeman said. ”
At the same time, some experts point out that the U.S. already has highly effective vaccines and antiviral drugs, and that no one should have even died of COVID-19, but this is not the case, which means that the supply of antiviral drugs such as PaxLovid should be increased more widely.
Now in the "controllable phase"
Fauci said the U.S. was in a "full-blown pandemic phase" in the winter and then entered what he called a "deceleration" phase. He said the U.S. is transitioning to a controllable phase. He expects the virus to continue to spread, but it will not cause a new wave of devastating hospitalizations and deaths.
"A few months ago was a full-blown epidemic with 900,000 cases a day, tens of thousands of hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths a day," he said. The death toll has now dropped from 3,000 to 300. ”
On April 22, 2022, Miami Airport, currently the airport and airlines have removed the mask injunction.
Last May, Fauci had thought the virus could reach a "manageable" phase in the fall, the Delta variant quickly dashed hopes, and Omicron subsequently triggered the biggest wave of cases to date.
Recently, the new Aomikron subtypes BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 began to spread, and their contagiousness is even stronger than previous strains, and the number of cases nationwide has risen again, but so far, the number of hospitalizations has not increased significantly.
Vaccinations and infections bring immunity
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently announced that nearly 60 percent of the population — and three-quarters of children ages 11 and younger — now have antibodies to the coronavirus in their blood because a large number of people in the U.S. have contraction and other coronavirus strains.
Fauci said it was not surprising that the pandemic had been spreading for nearly two and a half years, and antibody blood tests showed a high percentage of the U.S. population was infected with the virus. He added that while the immunity gained from infection is not indefinite, it does provide some protection against serious complications when people become infected in the future.
In addition, nearly 220 million people in the United States ( 66 % of the total population ) are fully vaccinated. Of those, 100 million people were also given their first booster dose.
When you combine the number of people infected with the number of people who are vaccinated, Fauci said, "you find that a significant percentage of the U.S. population already has some level of immunity." ”
Even if it is not counted, the situation in the United States is better than before
"I'm almost certain that we underestimated the number of infections in the U.S., Fauci said, because many have mild or no symptoms.
Part of the reason for this is that people aren't tested very often these days. Fauci said they may not report it to local health agencies if they test positive at home but don't show severe symptoms.
A COVID-19 testing station in Oakland, California.
Despite the recent uptick in COVID-19 cases, including vice president Kamala Harris, who has received three doses of the vaccine, Fauci reiterated that hospitalization rates are only slowly rising, unlike the surge caused by the Delta variant. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Tuesday that the number of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. has dropped to an average of about 300 a day for seven days.
Covid-19 is not going away completely
COVID-19 has killed nearly 1 million people in the United States, the country with the highest number of reported deaths to date. It has had a particularly brutal impact on blacks and other people of color, as well as on poor communities that do not have easy access to health care.
Fauci also echoed a warning issued this month by who and the United Nations that the COVID-19 situation in the United States does not necessarily reflect the rest of the world, and that globally, the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over because population-wide vaccination rates remain too low, especially in developing countries.
"Pandemic means that it's an infectious disease that's spreading rapidly around the world," Fauci said. So, if you look at the global landscape, there's no doubt that the pandemic is still going on. ”
The infectious disease expert said when the global pandemic would end was an "unanswerable question".
Looking ahead to the future and the global impact of COVID-19, Fauci said: "We will not eradicate this virus. But if the level of transmission remains "very low" and people are vaccinated "intermittently", it can be dealt with, but he said he did not know how often he needed to be vaccinated. "It could be once a year, or it could be longer."
Currently, about 1.5 percent of the U.S. population lives in high-prevalence communities, 6.5 percent in moderately endemic areas, and the remainder (92 percent) in low-prevalence communities.