During a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday, President Joe Biden declared the pandemic over in the United States, even as the number of Americans who have died from COVID continues to climb.
Dr. Alex Garza, head of the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, joined KMOX to talk about Biden's interview and discuss whether the pandemic is really over.
"It's not a cut and dry answer to 'Is the pandemic over,'" Dr. Garza said. "The way that I view it is, the acute phase of the pandemic, is indeed, in its waning days. And I think that's what most people would consider the end of the pandemic, and that means it's like, no longer affecting them in their everyday lives."
However, he said, the impacts of the pandemic are not gone, and we still have not reached an endemic phase. He added that it's difficult to specifically determine the "end" of a pandemic, and that there aren't any hard and fast rules.
Lots of people have said that as COVID has become more widespread and, in some cases, less severe, it's basically like the flu. Dr. Garza said he disagrees.
"Has it reached that sort of stable sort of level where we can accurately say, 'Hey, this is on par with influenza'? I don't think we're there yet," he said. "But hopefully this will become something that just is in the background that becomes more seasonal that we diagnose in those flu winter months when more respiratory viruses pop up, but we're just not there yet."
He said that while transmission numbers are down, the numbers aren't super reliable because of the increase in at-home testing. However, reported deaths and hospitalizations have decreased.
Hear more from Dr. Alex Garza on the state of the pandemic:
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