The emergency will be automatically extended until at least April 2023.
Photo: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
WASHINGTON – The US government extended the declaration of emergency due to the Covid-19 pandemic until spring 2023 on Friday to respond to a hypothetical increase in cases during the winter months.
Friday, the last day available for the Administration led by Joe Biden to communicate the end of the declaration of emergency, which, not having happened, automatically extends it until at least April of the following year.
The declaration of emergency for the Covid-19 pandemic has been in effect since January 2020.
In late September, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra said that while the country has made significant progress in the fight against Covid-19 since last year, the pandemic is not over yet.
“Between 300 and 400 people die of covid a day. We didn’t get over it”he told a group of reporters visiting a vaccination center in Washington.
The comments of the head of the Healthcare portfolio thus qualified the statements that the US president, Joe Biden, had previously released to CBS, where he had assured that “the pandemic is over”.
“What the president said is what everyone feels, that we are much better now” than a year ago, assured Becerra. However, Biden’s statement has already resonated among Republicans in Congress, who seek to reverse the declaration of a national emergency for Covid-19.
A group of 17 House lawmakers wrote a letter asking Biden to strike down the measure, and a Republican senator introduced a resolution for the upper house to vote on it.
“The federal government has spent about ten trillion dollars, causing an economic crisis“, the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
Becerra rejected the idea of revoking the declaration of emergency now and said that to make a decision, one must wait for the scientific community to decide.
“We will wait for scientists to give us guidance and tell us where we stand”he assured.
Between August and September 2022, the United States recorded an average of 356 daily deaths from Covid-19 and the disease caused by the virus is the third leading cause of death in the country, after cancer and heart disease.
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