Biden calls pandemic 'over' despite pathetic recall rates and new variants

Enlarge / US President Joe Biden speaks at the Detroit Auto Show in Detroit on September 14, 2022. September 14, 2022. Getty | Anadolu Agency

“The pandemic is over,” President Joe Biden said matter-of-factly in a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday night. The impromptu comment immediately grabbed headlines, along with criticism from health experts. It also likely raised the level of anxiety among administration officials, who have been scrambling to promote the use of reminders this fall. Some officials called the president's comment startling.

"We still have a problem with COVID. We're still working on it a lot," Biden immediately noted in the interview. "But the pandemic is over. If you notice, nobody's wearing a mask," he said, referring to the crowd at the Detroit auto show, where he made the comments. "Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And, so I think that's changing and I think that's a perfect example of that."

While many in the public health community will say that the pandemic is objectively not over, the president's remarks reflect the state of the country's relationship with the pandemic, which is resounding: "It's is complicated."

Not finished

According to the data, we are still in a pandemic. That's not to say there isn't cause for optimism — cases are down, deaths and hospitalizations are down, vaccines are widely available in the U.S., latest booster doses match to the currently circulating strain of SARS-CoV-2 (for now). But reported cases are still high, averaging more than 61,000 new cases a day. And these are only the cases that are reported. With most people relying on home testing, the actual number of cases is likely several multiples of this figure. Even based on reported cases, transmission rates are calculated to be high in 94% of US counties, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Although hospitalization and death rates are much lower than they used to be, 31,000 Americans are still hospitalized every day. And the current average of daily deaths is 464. Although some people may argue that some of these deaths are with COVID-19, rather than of COVID-19, the distinction may not be as significant as they think, given that COVID-19 is and always has been the most dangerous for people with underlying health conditions. As Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert, recently noted in an interview with NPR:

"What's the difference with someone who has mild congestive heart failure, goes to the hospital and gets COVID, then dies of deep congestive heart failure?" He asked. "Is it with the COVID or because of the COVID? The COVID certainly contributed to it."

"The worst time to quit"

Although the current plateau of around 400 deaths per day seems relatively low (it is eclipsed by a peak in February in the middle of the omicron wave, which hit more than 2,600 deaths per day), it is still a massive disease burden. If we continue to see this relatively low rate of 400 per day, that would annualize to 146,000 deaths per year. Such a figure would likely keep COVID-19 in the top five causes of death in the United States, potentially beating Alzheimer's disease, which killed 134,000 people in 2020. In reality, COVID-19 ranked at the top. third leading cause of death in 2020, killing more than 350,000 people. And for all those who argue that COVID-19 is now just as dangerous as the flu: even in the worst flu season in years, the 2017-2018 season, flu deaths reached around 52,000. And influenza is not associated with long-term illness like COVID-19.

Of course, this is only what is happening in the United States with the pandemic, which is by definition global. But current trends in the United States mirror those seen around the world, with relatively lower but still high cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Global deaths average more than 1,600 a day.

At a press briefing last week, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus made remarks noting the positive trends but directly contradicting...