When is the pandemic over?

Summary (IA Generated)

This week, President Joe Biden officially extended the national COVID-19 emergency declaration into a second year.

30, 2020, WHO called it a “public health emergency of international concern.

One would suppose that a coronavirus-variants-new-york.html”>pandemic is what we have when a “public health emergency of international concern” — which is actually referred to as a “coronavirus–pandemic-would-mean/”>PHEIC” — gets worse.

The term has hitherto been applied almost exclusively to new forms of flu, such as H1N1 in 2009 or Spanish flu in 1918, where the lack of population immunity and absence of a vaccine or effective treatments makes the outbreak potentially much more deadly than seasonal flu (which, although global, is not considered a pandemic).

It is generally accepted that once health authorities call an outbreak a pandemic, public policy should move toward isolating the intruder.

On March 13, 2020, President Donald Trump used the WHO declaration as a foundation for calling COVID-19 a “national emergency.

Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, offers a baseline for when we might be able to say we are no longer in an emergency.

“We’ll have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” Offit says.

S.

records fewer than 5,000 new cases daily (we are recording 69,000 new cases now) and records fewer than 100 COVID-related deaths each day (we are at about 1,900 now).

The Atlantic calculates that we are probably months away from reaching a level that a reasonable person would say we are no longer in an emergency.