America past the worst

The United States is finally ‘‘out of the full-blown explosive pandemic phase’’ that has led to nearly 1 million deaths from Covid-19 and more than two years of suffering and hardship, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci says.

‘‘We’re really in a transitional phase, from a deceleration of the numbers into hopefully a more controlled phase and endemicity,’’ Fauci told The Washington Post.

His comments came a day after he told PBS that he believed the country was ‘‘out of the pandemic phase’’.

Fauci said the pandemic was not over, and the US could still see new waves of infections as the virus continued to mutate and spin off highly transmissible variants.

However, he and other infectious disease experts are hoping that the population has built up enough immunity from previous infections and vaccinations to avoid another devastating surge in hospitalisations and deaths.

Fauci’s comments followed a report from the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicating that roughly three in five people in the US have already been infected by the coronavirus. About one in four people had a first-time infection during the winter wave caused by the Omicron variant.

The Omicron subvariant BA.2.12.1 is the latest version to seize the attention of public health experts. It is rapidly gaining traction in the US, and the CDC has estimated that it accounts for about 30% of new infections. CDC director Rochelle Walensky said preliminary estimates suggested it was about 25% more transmissible than the Omicron subvariant BA.2, itself more transmissible than the original Omicron strain.

Fauci said the US was in the ‘‘fullblown pandemic phase’’ during winter, then entered a period he referred to as the ‘‘deceleration’’ phase.

‘‘There’s the full-blown pandemic dynamic, the way we were months ago, where we were having 900,000 cases a day, tens of thousands of hospitalisations, 3000 deaths a day,’’ he said. ‘‘The deaths went from 3000 down to 300.’’

Restrictions are easing as many Americans appear to be putting the pandemic behind them. Mask requirements have been lifted across most of the country.