Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, told PBS’ Newshour that he believes the nation is “out of the pandemic phase.”
The U.S. is no longer seeing “tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert said. He says the huge drop in hospitalizations and cases is a good sign.
Just because there’s not a pandemic doesn’t mean the risk of COVID is over. The U.S. is still seeing about 50,000 new positive cases a day, which is a lot, though a lot less than the pandemic’s peak of about a million new cases a day. This has led to a decrease in masking requirements, which have been lifted entirely in much of the country.
But the pandemic has left the country more fragile than it found it, with a tragic death toll of a million people and many more still suffering from the effects of “long Covid” — something experts are only starting to understand. And immunocompromised Americans remain particularly vulnerable to serious cases of Covid, which is why many experts still recommend taking precautions to protect the vulnerable.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 60 percent of Americans have been infected with the coronavirus, and that includes three out of four children.
