RELATED: Dr. Fauci Says This Is Now the “Best Case Scenario” for Ending COVID. During an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation on Feb. 13, Scott Gottlieb, MD, former commissioner of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), discussed the current state of the pandemic in some areas of the U.S. and how uneven progress was affecting the removal of specific public health precautions. “There’s still parts of the country that have a lot of Omicron infection—not every part of the country is through this wave of the epidemic,” he said. “Clearly, the Northeast is [and] the mid-Atlantic, where cases are 20 cases per hundred thousand people per day. But when you look at states like Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, they’re at about 100 cases, or Mississippi, there are about 100 cases per hundred thousand people per day. That’s a pretty dense epidemic.” Despite stubbornly high case counts in certain places, national numbers continue to drop overall. One month after reaching a pandemic-high peak of 806,795 on Jan. 14, the national daily average has fallen to 154,912 as of Feb. 14, or 47 cases per 100,000 people, according to data from The New York Times. Figures show that cases have decreased by two-thirds over the past two weeks alone. But as new health reports from over the weekend were released, it’s clear that certain places are still seeing elevated case counts despite the downward trend. As of Feb. 14, Kentucky reported 123 cases per capita, Alaska saw 100 per 100,000 people, and West Virginia still faced 98 cases per capita, data from The Times shows.
RELATED: For more up-to-date information, sign up for our daily newsletter. During his interview, Gottlieb explained how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been having difficulty setting a national policy given how localized outbreaks currently appeared to be. But the former health official was optimistic that the coming weeks could see a transition in the way pandemic is handled. “I think what you’re going to see the CDC do, though, is come out with guidance that’s more specific to communities. That’s based on what the local prevalence is, and that’s probably where they should have been all along. I think they’re going to make that adaptation because there clearly are parts of the country where prevalence is low enough now and heading in a positive direction if they can start lifting this mitigation.“ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb However, Gottlieb wasn’t alone in his assessment of the pandemic. During an interview with the Financial Times on Feb. 8, Anthony Fauci, MD, chief White House COVID adviser, said that he also believed that the U.S. was about to transition both in the way the virus is affecting our daily lives and how we combat it. “As we get out of the full-blown pandemic phase of COVID-19, which we are certainly heading out of, these decisions will increasingly be made on a local level rather than centrally decided or mandated,” Fauci said. And although he stopped short of saying the virus has become endemic, added that it could soon reach an “equilibrium” that will allow some of the ways we’ve been handling the COVID pandemic to change. “There is no way we are going to eradicate this virus,” he told the newspaper. “But 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.” RELATED: This Is How Long Your Omicron Symptoms Will Last, Doctors Say.
