About three years after much of the U.S. went into lockdown due to COVID-19, views are mixed on when the pandemic should be considered over.
The World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Last week, the leader of WHO said that due to declining COVID-19 statistics, he expects to declare the pandemic ended later this year.
The number of COVID-19 deaths reported in the U.S. last week was the lowest in nearly three years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wilkes County has had 12 confirmed COVID-19 deaths so far in 2023 and 309 since the pandemic began.
The main coronavirus strain circulating in the U.S. appears to be plateauing. Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 makes up 90% of new coronavirus cases with no other strain yet posing a challenge to its dominance.
President Biden’s administration said in late January that it will end COVID-19 emergency declarations on May 11. Biden has repeatedly extended the measures, allowing millions of Americans to continue receiving free COVID-19 tests, vaccines and treatments. When it expires, those costs will be transferred to private insurance and government health plans.
Infectious disease experts contend that pandemics shouldn’t be declared over based on policy decisions, but rather scientific consensus. New COVID-19 subvariants make this challenging.
People being ready for the COVID-19 pandemic to be over and wanting this play into the issue. The world’s choice to move on from the pandemic is reflected in data becoming harder to find. For example, Johns Hopkins University announced earlier this month that it was shutting down its global COVID-19 tracker.
Christopher J.L. Murray, MD, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Wash., stated in an article on WebMD that when and whether the pandemic is over depends on how “pandemic” is defined. Murray said he believes the pandemic is already over because the emergency response phase has ended, but if this judgment is based on a pandemic “being an infection that goes all over the place, then we’re going to be in it for a very long time.”
Some historians say that for practical purposes, pandemics end when he majority of people believe they are over.
Polling conducted by Gallup on Feb. 21-28 found that about half of Americans say the pandemic is over, one-quarter are worried about contracting the disease and more than six in 10 think the situation is improving. Republicans are considerably more likely than Democrats to believe the pandemic is over.
Social distancing behaviors have waned as U.S. adults increasingly report they have either been vaccinated against or infected with COVID-19. About half of all Wilkes Countians have been vaccinated, a statistic that has been largely unchanged for most of the pandemic. Statewide, nearly 70% have vaccinated.
Only 33% of Gallup respondents said their lives are completely back to normal. Nearly half of U.S. adults, 47%, think pre-pandemic normalcy is not attainable for them, but 20% think their lives will eventually get back to normal.
Wafaa El-Sadr of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health cited the disconnect between believing the pandemic is over and wanting to get back to life as we knew it before the pandemic.
El-Sadr said the reality is that regardless of what is declared, substantial transmission and deaths due to COVID continue in the U.S. and the virus will be around for a long time.
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