The Pandemic Really Is Over

While the federal government declared the pandemic over some weeks back on the calendar, by the numbers, it really is over. See this New York Times article: “A Positive Covid Milestone.” In summary, “In a sign that the pandemic really is over, the total number of Americans dying each day is no longer historically abnormal.”

As for what we can attribute this success to, see this also from the same article:

“The progress stems mostly from three factors:

• First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
• Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
• Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.

“‘Nearly every death is preventable,’ Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. ‘We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.’”