President Joe Biden has declared the pandemic in the US over, although the number of Americans who have died from Covid continues to rise. "The pandemic is over. We are still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over," he said on television.
Biden also said that the US is doing "a lot of work" to control the virus. "If you notice, nobody wears masks. Everyone seems to be in pretty good shape… I think it's changing,” he said.
The statement surprised the president's own top health officials, many of whom learned of Biden's findings only through tweets and news headlines. The president had not originally planned to announce big news about Covid, nor had he consulted with his health advisers about declaring the end of the pandemic, two senior White House officials said, citing Politico USA.
But in contrast, Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warned yesterday that new Covid-19 variants could still emerge, especially in the coming winter months.
"The US is unlikely to eradicate the coronavirus and a new 'suspicious' variant, BA 2.75.2, is on the horizon, President Joe Biden's top medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, said Monday during a talk at the Center for Strategic Studies and International emphasizing that according to him, the new variant is expected between the end of autumn and the beginning of winter.
"We are not where we need to be if we are going to be able to 'live with the virus,'" Dr Fauci said, adding:
"We still need to be aware of how unusual this virus is and continues to be in its ability to evolve into new variants that defy standard public health mechanisms for dealing with an outbreak."
He went on to say: "The next question we ask: 'Will we be able to eliminate Covid from the US from most of the world?' and the answer is that it is unlikely, because it is highly transmissible, and the immunity afforded by the vaccine or infection is also transient."