Fauci says US is exiting ‘full blown pandemic phase’ and safety measures will increasingly be local

Young and healthy people may only need booster shot ‘every four or five years,’ chief medical adviser to the president suggests

Dr Anthony Fauci has said that the US is moving out of “the full-blown pandemic phase” and that safety measures to limit the spread will be increasingly local.

“There will also be more people making their own decisions on how they want to deal with the virus,” the chief medical adviser to the president told the Financial Times.

According to the World Health Organization, at least half a million people have died globally since the highly transmissible Omicron variant appeared in November of last year.

The Washington Post reported that the number of new cases of Covid-19 decreased by 44 per cent in the last week compared to the week before.

Hospitalizations during that same time period also decreased. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that hospitalizations have gone down by more than 28 per cent over the last three weeks.

But the seven-day average of deaths is at its highest point in the last year, reaching 2,600 daily deaths.

The number of Covid-19 deaths across the world increased for the fifth week in a row. In the last seven days, 68,000 deaths have been reported – an increase of seven per cent compared to the week before.

Since Omicron appeared, around 100,000 of the deaths have occurred in the US, according to WHO incident manager Abdi Mahamud. He said during a question and answer session on Tuesday that the number of deaths was “tragic” as the US is a country with a high supply of vaccines.

Dr Fauci told the Financial Times that he’s hopeful that restrictions could soon be eased, including masking requirements, over the course of the coming months.

“I hope we are looking at a time when we have enough people vaccinated and enough people with protection from previous infection that the Covid restrictions will soon be a thing of the past,” he said.

Not giving an exact date for when restrictions might end, Dr Fauci agreed with a suggestion that it could be sometime this year and he said that he hoped it would happen “soon”.

But he cautioned that regional health authorities could reinstate restrictions to handle local outbreaks.

Dr Fauci added that not everybody would require regular Covid-19 vaccine boosters, noting that those who are young, healthy, and without “underlying conditions” may only need a booster shot “every four or five years”.

Dr Fauci’s comments come as several states, including some led by Democratic governors, have signalled that they will lift school mask mandates, prompting CDC Director Dr Rochelle Walensky to say that this is “not the moment” to ease mask rules.

“I know people are interested in taking masks off. I too am interested. That would be one marker that we have much of the pandemic behind us,” Dr Walenksy told Reuters. “Right now our CDC guidance has not changed ... We continue to endorse universal masking in schools.”

“We have and continue to recommend masking in areas of high and substantial transmission – that is essentially everywhere in the country in public indoor settings,” she added.

While she said that she’s “cautiously optimistic” that the number of cases will fall below crisis levels, she added that “I don’t think we’re there right now”.