Biden declares COVID ‘pandemic is over.’ Here’s what experts say about the data

Since President Joe Biden’s declaration that the COVID-19 pandemic is done, a number of health experts are speaking out in response with some pointing to virus data.

“The pandemic is over,” Biden said Sunday, Sept. 18 during an interview with “60 Minutes.” “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it…but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”

A snapshot of recent U.S. data shows there have been more than 2 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and about 12,700 deaths due to the virus across the country within the past 28 days, according to Johns Hopkins University. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 1 million people have died nationwide.

The dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, Dr. Megan Ranney, disgreed with the president’s assertion that the pandemic is “over” by referencing recent death counts.

“Is the pandemic DIFFERENT? Sure,” Ranney wrote on Twitter on Sept. 18. “We have vaccines & infection-induced immunity. We have treatments. We have tests (while they last). The fatality rate is way down. And so we respond to it differently.”

“But over?! With 400 deaths a day?! I call malarkey,” Ranney added.

In the week before Sept. 15, 2,743 people died from COVID-19 in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Based on the data, that is about 391 deaths each day.

In another Sept. 18 tweet, Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist, wrote “with all due respect, @JoeBiden — you’re wrong. Pandemic is not over,” and noted the number of deaths within the past week.

“Almost 3,000 Americans are dying from #COVID19 every single week. A weekly 9/11 is a very big deal,” Feigl-Ding added, referencing how nearly 3,000 people died in during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

What is the definition of a pandemic?

There are several similar definitions of a pandemic out there that emphasize one detail in particular — it is a global occurrence.

Columbia University defines a pandemic as cutting “across international boundaries.”

“A true influenza pandemic occurs when almost simultaneous transmission takes place worldwide,” according to a scholarly paper published 2011 in the National Library of Medicine.

Internationally, there have been nearly 16 million COVID-19 cases and about 54,000 deaths within the past 28 days, Johns Hopkins University data shows.

During a Sept. 14 World Health Organization news briefing, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “Last week, the number of weekly reported deaths from COVID-19 was the lowest since March 2020.”

“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” Ghebreyesus added. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”

When asked about what is next for COVID-19 and the pandemic, Dr. William Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, told McClatchy News in an interview on Sept. 12 that “no one can absolutely predict the future, but we’ve seen with each successive wave that there have been fewer hospitalizations.”

“I’m optimistic that we’ll see a continuum where yes, COVID-19 is something we have to reckon with every winter, like we do influenza. But it won’t create the degree of illness that we’ve seen filling up our hospitals and overwhelming our medical personnel,” Gruber added, “provided we do vaccinate, and provide protection to individuals so the virus doesn’t have an opportunity to mutate and come back and produce serious disease.”

More experts comment on the status of the COVID pandemic

Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, wrote Sept. 19 on Twitter that “remember when the pandemic was over in June 2021, when we were down to <12,000 (real number) confirmed cases per day, and Independence was declared?”

“Then came Delta. And then Omicron BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.5,” Topol added.

Meanwhile, Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor at the University of California San Francisco, described Biden’s pandemic comments as “important.”

“The emergency or pandemic phase is over,” Prasad wrote on Twitter on Sept. 18. “COVID will be around for tens of thousands of years. Time to stop using EUA at FDA and time to actively advise people to throw away their n95s and get back to living. Getting COVID is inevitable.”

Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, described Biden’s Sept. 18 statement about the pandemic being “over” as “deeply craven, cynical” in a Sept. 19 Twitter thread.

Gonsalves added that it “dishonors our 1M+ dead, those who have fought to keep people alive and safe.”

As of Sept. 19, about 50% of the U.S. lives in a location where COVID-19 levels in the community are considered medium or high, while the other half of the nation lives in a location where virus transmission levels are considered low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

U.S. COVID-19 cases were dominated by the omicron BA.5 subvariant for the week ending Sept. 17 as it made up 84.8% of cases, agency data estimates show.

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