President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said he believes the United States is no longer in a pandemic.
Fauci said during a Tuesday interview that while the coronavirus is still around and a risk, it is not a pandemic-level risk. The White House adviser’s remarks came during a notable surge of COVID-19 among politicians.
“We are certainly right now, in this country, out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci told PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff. “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.”
Fauci emphasized that medical professionals cannot “eradicate” COVID-19 but said he expects to vaccinate people intermittently in an attempt to keep case counts down.
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That vaccination might be “every year, that might be longer, in order to keep that level low,” Fauci said. “But right now, we are not in the pandemic phase in this country. Pandemic means a widespread, throughout the world, infection that spreads rapidly among people.”
Fauci’s comments come as a new strain of COVID-19, known as BA.2 omicron, has risen in the last month and is responsible for the majority of new COVID-19 infections. While COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations have been on the rise since March 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of COVID-19-related deaths has declined significantly.
Several members of Washington have caught the coronavirus in April. An estimated 72 cases of COVID-19 have been connected to the Gridiron Dinner, a social event in which hundreds of journalists and lawmakers gathered on April 2.
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Vice President Kamala Harris and Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden both reported testing positive for COVID-19 on Tuesday.
