The United States has entered the next phase in the COVID-19 crisis, according to the White House’s chief medical adviser.
“We are certainly, right now, in this country out of the pandemic phase,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday on PBS’ “NewsHour.” “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.”
But that doesn’t mean the coronavirus is going anywhere any time soon.
In fact, Fauci said the world at-large remains in a pandemic, and Americans likely will continue to need boosters, possibly on an annual basis. But the U.S. — due to low case numbers, vaccination and available treatments — has moved beyond the “pandemic phase” more than two years after COVID-19 arrived.
“Pandemic means a widespread, throughout-the-world infection that spreads rapidly among people,” he said. “So, if you look at the global situation, there’s no doubt this pandemic is still ongoing.”
The nation is transitioning from a pandemic to an endemic stage, when health officials will treat the coronavirus as a seasonal disease, Fauci added.
On Wednesday, he doubled down on his message, telling The Washington Post the U.S. is finally “out of the full-blown explosive pandemic phase.”
“We’re really in a transitional phase, from a deceleration of the numbers into hopefully a more controlled phase and endemicity,” Fauci said.
His declaration comes days after a Florida federal judge struck down the Biden administration’s extension of a mask mandate on public transportation. Some infectious diseases experts expressed concern that community infection levels are still too high to remove all safeguards, especially on mass transit systems.
Meanwhile, new omicron subvariants — including “stealth omicron” (BA.2) and a subvariant of its own, BA.2.12.1 — are pushing up new case totals in New Jersey and across the country.
However, infection levels remain far lower than the reported numbers in January, when the omicron variant was engulfing the nation.
“Right now we’re at a low enough level that I believe that we’re transitioning into endemicity…” Fauci told The Washington Post. “We’re not in the full-blown explosive pandemic phase. That does not mean that the pandemic is over.”
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