Hundreds of deaths every day, US President still declares 'pandemic is over'?

President Biden declared 'the pandemic is over', but admitted Covid-19 still poses many problems. Photo: Reuters

In a televised interview on September 18, US President Joe Biden affirmed that “the pandemic is over”, although he admitted that “we are still having problems with Covid”, as the US continues to grapple with coronavirus cases that are killing hundreds of Americans every day.

“We’re still having trouble with Covid-19,” the president told CBS’s “60 Minutes.” “We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But it’s over. If you look, no one’s wearing masks. People seem to be in pretty good shape. And I think that’s changing.”

Last week, the World Health Organization declared the pandemic was nearing an end, after revealing that weekly deaths were at their lowest since March 2020.

However, the organization warned that the Corona virus still poses a “global emergency” and emphasized that in the first 8 months of 2022, more than 1 million people died from the Covid-19 epidemic.

In the US, the death toll from the pandemic has dropped significantly since the start of Mr Biden’s term, when more than 3,000 Americans were dying each day, as health care, medicines and vaccines have become more widely available.

But according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 400 people are still dying from Covid-19 every day in the country.

Mr. Biden also had to quarantine for more than 2 weeks at the White House after contracting Covid-19 twice, starting in July. His wife, First Lady Jill, also contracted the virus in August. Mr. Biden asserted that the mild cases were evidence of improvements in health care during his presidency.

Mr. Biden has asked Congress to approve an additional $22.4 billion in spending to prepare for a potential surge in cases in the fall.