Health experts and officials say the U.S. is not yet in the final stages of the COVID-19 pandemic but that the country is now “going in the right direction,” and some are hopeful that future surges of coronavirus variants won’t be as harmful due to vaccination levels and immunity built up during the omicron wave.

What You Need To Know

  • Health experts and officials say the U.S. is not yet in the final stages of the COVID-19 pandemic but that it's moving closer to a more manageable place
  • The overall level of immunity has been boosted by both vaccination levels and the large number of people infected by omicron, experts said

  • While omicron cases are declining, deaths and hospitalizations are still high, and metrics would have to reach a much lower level for COVID-19 to become a "normal" circulating virus, like the flu

But living with COVID in an endemic capacity — when it exists within society like other viruses, such as the flu — will only be possible with the continued use of tools like vaccines, therapeutics and testing, they warned.

“We believe we are now going in the right direction,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, on Wednesday. 

The benchmark, Fauci said, is a level of “community protection” — or immunity throughout the population — that would prevent COVID-19 from dominating Americans’ lives and overwhelming health care systems.

That level of protection was boosted, experts say, by the sheer number of omicron infections over the last two months in combination with vaccination rates.

“I am hopeful that these future surges will become less disruptive, though, because of the high levels and broad immunity that we've gained,” said Dr. Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in a media briefing Thursday.

“We may still see surges either seasonally or perhaps multiple times a year from this virus,” she added. “But once we start to see that even more disconnected from hospitalizations and deaths, that's when we can kind of start to take a deep breath.”

For now, omicron cases are declining — including by more than 35% in the last week — yet they’re still at record highs over previous pandemic peaks, and the country is still reporting more than 2,500 deaths each day, on average, with many hospitals still overwhelmed.

Watson said that a more manageable level of cases would be ten or fewer per 100,000 people. The infection rate is still averaging more than 800 cases per 100,000, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

And while experts haven’t ruled out another challenging surge, they say it could be more manageable.

“There will be more variants in the future. My apologies for being the bearer of that bad news,” said' Dr. Andy Pekosz, vice chair of Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology.

“But it's clear we have vaccines. We have treatments and therapies, all of which can minimize severe disease in most people,” he added.

A group of former Biden health advisers last month called on the president to shift his strategy to accept COVID as a “new normal” and plan for the use of tools like testing and contact tracing within that mindset.

And some Democratic governors have indicated their own shifts to a more “endemic” COVID-19 strategy, recently including California Governor Gavin Newsom, CalMatters reported this week.

“We believe we will get there,” Dr. Fauci said Wednesday. “We can’t guarantee that there will not be another variant that challenges us. But the best that we can do with that is to be prepared for it.”