The doctor. Anthony Fauci said EE.UU. is coming out of “the full pandemic phase” and that the security measures to limit the spread will be increasingly local.
“There will also be more people who will be able to make their own decisions about how they want to deal with the virus,” the president’s top medical adviser told the Financial Times.
According to World Health Organizationat least half a million people have died worldwide since the variant appeared omicron with high transmissibility in November last year.
El Washington Post reported that the number of new cases of covid-19 decreased by 44 percent in the last week compared to the previous week.
Hospitalizations during that same period also decreased. The data of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of Diseases show that hospitalizations fell by more than 28 percent in the last three weeks.
But the seven-day average of deaths is at its highest point in the last year, after reaching 2,600 daily deaths.
The number of deaths from covid-19 worldwide increased for the fifth week in a row. In the last seven days, 68,000 deaths have been reported, an increase of seven percent compared to the previous week.
Since omicron appeared, about 100,000 of all deaths have occurred in the US, according to WHO incident manager Abdi Mahamud. He said during a question-and-answer session Tuesday that the number of deaths was “tragic” as the United States is a country with a high supply of vaccines.
Dr. Fauci told the Financial Times that he is hopeful that restrictions may be eased soon, including mask-wearing requirements, over the course of the next few months.
“I hope that we are facing a time where we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infections that Covid restrictions will soon be a thing of the past,” he said.
Without giving an exact date for when the restrictions might end, Dr. Fauci agreed with the suggestion that it could be sometime this year, saying he hoped it would happen “soon.”
But he warned that regional health authorities could reinstate restrictions to handle local outbreaks.
Dr. Fauci added that not everyone would require regular COVID-19 vaccine boosters, noting that those who are young, healthy and without “underlying conditions” might only need a booster shot “every four to five years.”
Dr. Fauci’s comments come as several states, including some run by governors democratshave signaled that they will remove mask mandates from schools, prompting CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky to say that now is “not the time” to ease mask rules.
“I know that people are interested in removing their masks; I am also interested. That would be a sign that much of the pandemic is behind us,” Dr. Walenksy told Reuters. “At this time, our guidance at the CDC has not changed … we still support universal use of face coverings in schools.”
“We have recommended and continue to recommend the use of face coverings in areas of high and substantial transmission, which would be in practice all parts of the country in public indoor settings,” he added.
While he said he is “moderately optimistic” that the number of cases will drop below crisis levels, he added that “I don’t think we’ve gotten to that point yet.”
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