WASHINGTON – As reported cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. continue to wane, the nation’s top infectious disease expert said this week the country is transitioning to a new phase in its improving response to the coronavirus.
In a series of interviews held Tuesday and Wednesday with PBS’s “NewsHour” and The Washington Post respectively, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that while the global COVID-19 pandemic continues, the U.S. has now made it “out of the pandemic phase.”
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Fauci referred to one of five contextualized “phases” he uses to describe pandemics — (true / full-blown) pandemic, deceleration, control, elimination and eradication — which he detailed during a Jan. 18 World Economic Forum Davos Agenda online conference.
“When I talk about the pandemic, I put it into five phases: the truly pandemic phase where the whole world is really very negatively impacted as we are right now. Then there’s that deceleration of the pandemic. Then there’s control. There’s elimination and eradication,” Fauci said at the conference. “I think if you look at the history of infections diseases, we’ve only eradicated one infectious disease in Man, that’s smallpox. That’s not going to happen with this virus.”
Fauci carried that same cautionary optimism to this week’s interviews, where in speaking with The Washington Post he urged readers to not be misinterpreted that his comments could suggest the pandemic was over outright, only that things were showing improvement as the U.S., in his view, transitions to the “control” phase.
“There’s the full-blown pandemic dynamic, the way we were months ago, where we were having 900,000 cases a day, tens of thousand of hospitalizations, 3,000 deaths a day.” he said. “The deaths went from 3,000 down to 300.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that an estimated at least 58% of American adults and three in four U.S. children have now had COVID-19. In the report, officials linked the dramatic rise in cases between December 2021 and February 2022 to the omicron variant.
In Florida, 36,483 cases of COVID-19 were reported between April 8-21, up by more than 15,000 cases compared to the two weeks before that but down drastically from when the state shattered case records in January, reporting more than 77,000 positives in one day.
Speaking with PBS, Fauci echoed what he said in the online conference about smallpox, repeating his belief that COVID-19 would not ever be completely eradicated. Instead, he said the virus’ spread could be kept “very low” if people are “intermittently” vaccinated against it to rebuff defenses as time goes on, but he did not specify how often he thought that would have to happen.
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