The United States is out of the Covid-19 pandemic phase, Fauci said

“We are certainly out of the pandemic phase right now in this country,” Fauci told PBS NewsHour on Tuesday.

“Namely, we do not have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are currently at a low level. So if you say are we out of the pandemic phase in this country? We are, “he said.

Covid-19 cases in the United States have dropped dramatically in the last few months as the Omicron wave receded.

But daily cases are still twice as high as most of last summer.

New cases are rising again in most states, and hospitalizations have also begun to rise in the past week.

Fewer people are dying from Covid-19 now than during most of the pandemic, but with more than 400 deaths a day, the last two months of Covid-19 have been more deadly than recent flu seasons.

Fauci said that although the coronavirus would not be eradicated, the level of the virus in society could be kept very low if people were vaccinated periodically, probably every year.

Local health officials in the United States are still working to get more people fully vaccinated and reinforced against Covid-19.

The situation with Covid-19 in the United States also does not necessarily reflect what is happening in the rest of the world, said Fauci.

“A pandemic means a worldwide infection that is spreading rapidly among humans,” Fauci said. “So, if you look at the global situation, there is no doubt that this pandemic is still going on.”

The pandemic shift is not a language Lori Tremel Freeman, chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, heard in conversations at local health departments, she said Wednesday.

But there has been a slight shift in place, with local health officials now returning some focus to areas outside of Covid, such as maternal health, child immunizations, tuberculosis, HIV and other public health issues.

“I think there are subtle changes in health departments at the local level to normalize the pandemic response in a way that allows them to return to the core work of their public health departments,” Freeman said. “But those words that were used at the end of the pandemic are not spreading well in public health at the moment.”

Jacqueline Howard and CNN’s Deidre McPhillips contributed to this signal.