Sorry, Mr President, Covid isn’t over. It’s just that we’ve got other problems

President Joe Biden has declared that the Covid pandemic is over in the US, despite the fact that the number of Americans dying continues to rise – 400 people lose their lives to the virus every day.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the president’s Chief Medical Advisor, said: “We are not where we need to be if we’re going to able to live with the virus.”

So mixed messages from across the pond. Here in Scotland the Health

Secretary Humza Yousaf has warned the NHS is facing an exceptionally difficult winter with another wave “a high possibility.”

Even last year that would have thrown us all into a panic, but it just

goes to show how normalised the virus has become now that it hardly causes a stir.

We are facing so many other challenges at the moment, with staff shortages and long waiting times in hospitals, not to mention the cost of living crisis, that Covid now seems just one more thing to contend with. But not the dominant one any more.

And that in itself is a depressing sign of the times.