Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief medical adviser, had good news this week about the state of COVID in the U.S.
First, Fauci told PBS’ Judy Woodruff that the United States is “right now out of the pandemic phase. 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 then followed that up with a similar comment to The Washington Post, saying the country is finally “out of the full-blown explosive pandemic phase. We’re really in a transitional phase, from a deceleration of the numbers into hopefully a more controlled phase and endemicity,” Fauci told The Post.
Fauci’s optimism coincides with a briefing this week by Dr. Kristie Clarke of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where she announced that as a result of the large number of Omicron cases this winter, almost 60 percent of the people in the U.S. now have antibodies to the virus in their blood, rising to almost 75 percent of children 11 and younger.
The U.S. could still face new waves of infections, Fauci said, as the virus mutates and creates new variants. And the global situation has worsened in many areas, including China. A Global COVID tracker on the CDC web site illustrates cases in a map format.
