“US pandemic phase over” says Fauci

Anthony S Fauci, the Chief Medical Adviser to President Joe Biden says that the US is over the pandemic phase of Covid-19 with cases and hospitalisations notably down.

Speaking on PBS’s Newshour, Fauci said: “We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase.” That statement was clarified today Wednesday April 27^th in an interview with the Washington Post, in which he said that whilst the pandemic is ongoing, the US is moving to a period of normalisations where the virus is no longer causing the level of sickness seen during the wave of Omicron infections over the winter months.

Doubling down on his statement Fauci said: “The world is still in a pandemic. There’s no doubt about that. Don’t anybody get any misinterpretation of that. We are still experiencing a pandemic.”

Referring to his view that the country is moving towards normality he said that the US is in a “deceleration phase” having moved out of the full blown pandemic.

 “There’s the full-blown pandemic dynamic, the way we were months ago, where we were having 900,000 cases a day, tens of thousands of hospitalisations, three thousand deaths a day.

“The deaths went from 3,000 down to 300.”

After saying this time last year that the virus could reach the control phase by the autumn, the world got sick again as the delta and omicron variants spread, but the believes this time it is different.

“Right now we’re at a low enough level that I believe that we’re transitioning into endemicity. … We’re not in the full-blown explosive pandemic phase. That does not mean that the pandemic is over.

“A pandemic means widespread infection throughout the world. … In our country we’re transitioning into more of a controlled endemicity.”

Nearly one million Americans have died from the virus with many choosing to flaunt the regulations, however with most of those gone and judges declaring a mandate to wear masks on buses illegal it is for all intents and purposes back to normal.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said that as at the end of February, nearly 60 percent of Americans, including 3 out of every 4 children, have been infected by the virus. However they did warn that the data did not indicate that the US has widespread immunity.

Experts say that having had the virus does provide some level of protection, but the vaccines available provide the best protection. The US however, has a relatively low level of vaccinations with many choosing not to do so for a variety of reasons, including the many conspiracy theories doing the rounds.

Although Fauci says the US is over the pandemic phase, there was a subtle reminder this week that it is still around with Vice-President Kamala Harris testing positive. She is believed to be asymptomatic.

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