US extends emergency declaration for COVID-19 until spring 2023 – El Financiero

The US government has extended the declaration of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic As far as spring 2023 to respond to a hypothetical increase in cases during the winter months.

This Friday was the last day available to the Administration led by Joe Biden to communicate the end of the declaration of emergency, which, having not occurred, automatically extends it until at least April next year.

Emergency declaration due to pandemic brings Valid from January 2020.

In late September, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra said that while the country has made significant progress in fighting COVID-19 since last year, the pandemic is not over yet.

“Between 300 and 400 people die of COVID every 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 president of the United States, Joe Biden, had previously caved to CBS, where he assured that “the pandemic is over”.

“What the president said is what everyone feels, that we are much better off now” than we were a year ago, Becerra said. However, Biden’s statement has already resonated with Republicans in Congress, who are seeking to reverse the declaration of a national emergency.

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, which has resulted in an economic crisis,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.

Becerra rejected the idea of ​​lifting the declaration of emergency now and said that in order to make a decision, we have to wait for the scientific community to pronounce itself.

“We will wait for scientists to give us guidance and tell us where we stand,” he said.

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.