The US could become a place where Covid-19 transforms into a situation where we “learn to live with it,” according to a former member of President Biden’s coronavirus task force.
Speaking on NBC’s Meet The Press today, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel cited vaccines, new treatments, and other mitigation measures that he claims will help make the coronavirus more manageable and akin to the flu. Emanuel’s comments echo those of other government officials and medical personnel, who appear to be moving away from scare tactics on case loads and toward acknowleding that deaths are flat and hospitalizations won’t face a doomsday scenario.
“We think that over the course of 2022, we will get to an endemic stage, and the plan is — or the proposal is — we need a strategic plan for that, that covers vaccines, getting more people vaccinated, and the only way to do that, as we’ve been very clear over time, is mandates,” Emanuel said.
He targeted the next three months as critical, “to be prepared when COVID is really just in the air, like RSV, another respiratory virus, like influenza, like adenovirus, all the respiratory viruses. It’s going to be here. We’re going to learn to live with it,” he said.
The current explosion of omicron cases has prevented the US from reaching the endemic stage. “If you’ve got 1,500 people a day dying from this disease, it’s still a pandemic, and omicron is spreading,” he said.
