Fauci says the US is coming out of the ‘pandemic phase’

Dr. Anthony Fauci expressed optimism about the state of the pandemic in the US on Tuesday.

“We are certainly right now in this country outside of the pandemic phase,” said Fauci, the White House’s top medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he told PBS NewsHour.

the later told the Washington Post that the United States had entered the “control” stage of the pandemic, as the coronavirus is causing much lower levels of hospitalizations and deaths than during the winter surge in omicrons.

Fauci has previously described five phases of the pandemic. The first, a full-fledged pandemic, is where the United States has spent most of the last two years. The second is slowdown and the third is control, indicating that the virus is becoming endemic in the population.

After this should come elimination and eradication, although the virus will probably never be eradicated, Fauci told PBS.

Fauci, who is President Joe Biden’s top Covid adviser, told The Post that entering a new phase doesn’t mean the entire pandemic is over.

“The world is still in a pandemic. No doubt about that. Let no one misunderstand that. We are still experiencing a pandemic,” she said.

Fauci, 81, decided not to attend this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner due to concerns about his own risk of Covid.

The United States is seeing about 51,000 Covid cases and just under 400 deaths per day, on average, according to the NBC News tally. But that average number of cases has risen 49 percent in the past two weeks, even as infections are undercounted due to the common use of home testing.

Still, many people in the US have some form of immunity that should protect them from serious illness, Fauci said.

“If you add up the people who have been infected plus the people who have been vaccinated and hopefully boosted, you have a pretty substantial proportion of the United States population that has some degree of immunity that is residual,” he told PBS. NewsHour.

AN monday report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 58 percent of the US had evidence of prior coronavirus infection as of February, based on tens of thousands of blood samples. Sixty-six percent of the country is fully vaccinated and 46 percent of the population has been boosted, According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Globally, there are around 674,000 average Covid cases per day, although cases worldwide have dropped 35 per cent in the last two weeks. according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The World Health Organization last week recorded its lowest weekly global death total since March 2020, at just over 15,000.

However, WHO officials said in a briefing on monday that many more covid deaths could still be prevented. About 40 percent of the world’s population is not fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data.

“We are certainly in a different phase of this pandemic, but we are still in the middle of this pandemic,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid.

The risk of new and dangerous variants also remains, WHO leaders said. Insufficient testing and surveillance could make it harder to detect new variants, they added.

“As many countries scale back testing, the WHO is receiving less and less information about transmission and sequencing,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “This makes us increasingly blind to patterns of transmission and evolution, but this virus will not go away just because countries stopped looking for it. It is still spreading, it is still changing and it is still killing. The threat of a dangerous new variant remains.” “. very real.”