Adam Sabes
Sun, September 18, 2022
President Biden said during a television interview on Sunday night that the COVID-19 pandemic "is over."
"Is the pandemic over?," a reporter asked Biden. "The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it," Biden responded.
Biden made the statement during an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," which was his first interview with a news organization in seven months.
"If you notice, no one's wearing a mask, everybody seems to be in pretty good shape," Biden added while he walked through the Detroit Auto Show.
US President Joe Biden
Biden has used the COVID-19 pandemic emergency as a reason for his administration's plan to end Title 42 as well as the recent student loan handout.
Biden's remarks about the COVID-19 pandemic come as America is just about a month and a half away from the midterm elections.
Biden says the 'pandemic is over' despite the US maintaining one of the highest death rates worldwide with nearly 400 Americans dying of COVID-19 daily
Isabella Zavarise
Sun, September 18, 2022
President Joe Biden speaks with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on September 1, 2022.AP Photo/Susan Walsh
President Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic was over in an interview with CBS News on Sunday.
"We're still doing a lot of work on it, but the pandemic is over," said Biden.
According to the CDC, the US is averaging around 400 deaths per day.
President Joe Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic was over in an interview with CBS News on Sunday, despite the US maintaining one of the highest death rates worldwide.
The comment was made during a tour of the Detroit Auto Show with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. As they were walking, Pelley asked Biden: "Is the pandemic over?"
"The pandemic is over," Biden said, but acknowledged the virus is still a problem. "We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it," he added.
Gesturing to attendees who weren't wearing masks to support his point, Biden said "Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it's changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it."
While cases are falling, Biden's comments come as hundreds of Americans continue to die from the infectious disease. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US is averaging around 400 deaths per day.
As of September 17, data from Johns Hopkins University found that the US has some of the highest COVID-19 figures globally in terms of cases and deaths. Next to the US is Japan, with 1,139 deaths recorded over the previous week.
States across the US are rolling back pandemic-related restrictions such as lifting mask mandates. Federal regulations still require passengers flying to the US from international destinations to be vaccinated.
In May, the President told Americans to not grow numb as the country's death toll rose to 1 million people.
On Wednesday, a spokesperson from the World Health Organization said the "end is in sight" but urged countries to maintain their vigilance, according to Reuters.
The news outlet reported that experts from the organization will meet again in October to decide whether the pandemic is still an international public health emergency.
Biden says 'the pandemic is over' even as death toll, costs mount
A woman takes a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) test at a pop-up testing site in New York
Sun, September 18, 2022
By Trevor Hunnicutt
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden said in an interview aired on Sunday that "the pandemic is over," even though the country continues to grapple with coronavirus infections that kill hundreds of Americans daily.
"The pandemic is over," Biden said during an interview conducted with CBS' "60 Minutes" program on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show, an event which drew thousands of visitors.
"We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lotta work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one's wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it's changing."
The toll of the COVID-19 pandemic has diminished significantly since early in Biden's term when more than 3,000 Americans per day were dying, as enhanced care, medications and vaccinations have become more widely available.
But nearly 400 people a day continue to die from COVID-19 in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Biden spent more than two weeks isolated in the White House after two bouts with COVID-19, starting in July. His wife Jill contracted the virus in August. Biden has said the mild cases were a testament to the improvements in care during his presidency.
Biden has asked Congress for $22.4 billion more in funding to prepare for a potential fall case surge.
Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Shri Navaratnam
Health experts reacted with dismay Monday to President Joe Biden’s assertion that the pandemic is over in an interview on “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday.
“We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. … But the pandemic is over,” Biden told CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”
Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, accused the president of magical thinking and perhaps having too much confidence in the new bivalent boosters.
Others noted that with more than 400 deaths from COVID every day on average, the U.S. is suffering 9/11-level casualties every week, hardly a sign that the pandemic is fully contained.
Others said there’s no way of knowing what will happen once winter sets in and people spend more time indoors together.
Just last week, the head of the World Health Organization said that while the end is in sight, “we’re not there yet.”
The statement sent the stocks of vaccine makers sharply lower. Moderna was last down 9.5%, Pfizer was down 1.8% and BioNTech was down 11.8%. Novavax which had its protein-based vaccine win authorization in the U.S. in July, was down 2.4%.
U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease, although the true tally is likely higher than reported, because data is not being collected on the many people who are testing at home.
The daily average for new cases stood at 61,712 on Sunday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 29% from two weeks ago. The tracker is showing that cases are rising in seven states, all in the Northeast — Connecticut, Maine, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont — and that cases are flat in Pennsylvania.
See also: Impact of COVID-19 on life expectancy is misleading
The daily average for hospitalizations was down 12%, to 33,143, while the daily average for deaths was down 6%, to 464.
From the CDC: Stay Up to Date with COVID-19 Vaccines Including Boosters
Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began
Other COVID-19 news you should know about:
• A bus reportedly taking 47 people to COVID-19 quarantine in southwestern China crashed before dawn Sunday morning, killing 27 and injuring 20 others, the Associated Press reported. The bus overturned on an expressway in Guizhou province, according to a brief statement from the Sandu county police, which did not mention any connection to quarantine.
• The beer is flowing at Munich’s world-famous Oktoberfest for the first time since 2019, the AP reported separately. With three knocks of a hammer and the traditional cry of “O’zapft is” — “It’s tapped” — Mayor Dieter Reiter inserted the tap in the first keg at noon on Saturday, officially opening the festivities after a two-year break forced by the coronavirus pandemic.
• Cities from Anchorage to New Orleans have ended or are winding down a program that housed homeless people in hotels and motels during the pandemic, the AP reported. The program was designed to avoid crowding in shelters. In Denver, Federal Emergency Management Agency funds directed through the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless helped keep a Quality Inn running for the past two and a half years. But the $9 million spent to lease the hotel from its owner and an additional $5 to $6 million in operational costs became unsustainable, said John Parvensky, president and CEO of the coalition.The COVID-19 pandemic has renewed interest in the practice of testing sewage to track outbreaks of disease, including polio, an outbreak of which prompted a disaster emergency declaration in New York state earlier this month. The Wall Street Journal visited a Bay Area wastewater facility to find out how testing works and what it can tell us about public health. (Photo illustration: Ryan Trefes)
Here’s what the numbers say
The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 612 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.52 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.
The U.S. leads the world with 95.7 million cases and 1,053,461 fatalities.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 224.6 million people living in the U.S. are fully vaccinated, equal to 67.7% of the total population. Just 109.2 million have had a booster, equal to 48.6% of the vaccinated population, and 22.5 million of those 50 and over who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 34.7% of those who received a first booster.
Since President Joe Biden’s declaration that the COVID-19 pandemic is done, a number of health experts are speaking out in response with some pointing to virus data.
“The pandemic is over,” Biden said Sunday, Sept. 18 during an interview with “60 Minutes.” “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it…but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”
A snapshot of recent U.S. data shows there have been more than 2 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and about 12,700 deaths due to the virus across the country within the past 28 days, according to Johns Hopkins University. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 1 million people have died nationwide.
The dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, Dr. Megan Ranney, disgreed with the president’s assertion that the pandemic is “over” by referencing recent death counts.
“Is the pandemic DIFFERENT? Sure,” Ranney wrote on Twitter on Sept. 18. “We have vaccines & infection-induced immunity. We have treatments. We have tests (while they last). The fatality rate is way down. And so we respond to it differently.”
“But over?! With 400 deaths a day?! I call malarkey,” Ranney added.
In the week before Sept. 15, 2,743 people died from COVID-19 in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Based on the data, that is about 391 deaths each day.
In another Sept. 18 tweet, Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist, wrote “with all due respect, @JoeBiden — you’re wrong. Pandemic is not over,” and noted the number of deaths within the past week.
“Almost 3,000 Americans are dying from #COVID19 every single week. A weekly 9/11 is a very big deal,” Feigl-Ding added, referencing how nearly 3,000 people died in during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
What is the definition of a pandemic?
There are several similar definitions of a pandemic out there that emphasize one detail in particular — it is a global occurrence.
Columbia University defines a pandemic as cutting “across international boundaries.”
“A true influenza pandemic occurs when almost simultaneous transmission takes place worldwide,” according to a scholarly paper published 2011 in the National Library of Medicine.
Internationally, there have been nearly 16 million COVID-19 cases and about 54,000 deaths within the past 28 days, Johns Hopkins University data shows.
During a Sept. 14 World Health Organization news briefing, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “Last week, the number of weekly reported deaths from COVID-19 was the lowest since March 2020.”
“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” Ghebreyesus added. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”
When asked about what is next for COVID-19 and the pandemic, Dr. William Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, told McClatchy News in an interview on Sept. 12 that “no one can absolutely predict the future, but we’ve seen with each successive wave that there have been fewer hospitalizations.”
“I’m optimistic that we’ll see a continuum where yes, COVID-19 is something we have to reckon with every winter, like we do influenza. But it won’t create the degree of illness that we’ve seen filling up our hospitals and overwhelming our medical personnel,” Gruber added, “provided we do vaccinate, and provide protection to individuals so the virus doesn’t have an opportunity to mutate and come back and produce serious disease.”
More experts comment on the status of the COVID pandemic
Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, wrote Sept. 19 on Twitter that “remember when the pandemic was over in June 2021, when we were down to <12,000 (real number) confirmed cases per day, and Independence was declared?”
“Then came Delta. And then Omicron BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.5,” Topol added.
Meanwhile, Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor at the University of California San Francisco, described Biden’s pandemic comments as “important.”
“The emergency or pandemic phase is over,” Prasad wrote on Twitter on Sept. 18. “COVID will be around for tens of thousands of years. Time to stop using EUA at FDA and time to actively advise people to throw away their n95s and get back to living. Getting COVID is inevitable.”
Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, described Biden’s Sept. 18 statement about the pandemic being “over” as “deeply craven, cynical” in a Sept. 19 Twitter thread.
Gonsalves added that it “dishonors our 1M+ dead, those who have fought to keep people alive and safe.”
As of Sept. 19, about 50% of the U.S. lives in a location where COVID-19 levels in the community are considered medium or high, while the other half of the nation lives in a location where virus transmission levels are considered low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
U.S. COVID-19 cases were dominated by the omicron BA.5 subvariant for the week ending Sept. 17 as it made up 84.8% of cases, agency data estimates show.
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