Biden Says Covid Isn’t ‘New Normal’ But It’s Here to Stay

(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden said surging Covid-19 cases won’t be the “new normal,” though the virus is likely to endure and can be managed with newly developed tools.

“Covid -- as we’re dealing with it now -- is not here to stay,” Biden said to reporters at the White House on Friday. “Having Covid in the environment here and in the world is probably here to stay.”

The president’s remarks came after six of his former health advisers published articles saying the U.S. strategy to fight the pandemic needs to be overhauled and adjusted to the idea that living with the virus would become the “new normal.”

The U.S. recorded a record one million cases on Monday, and hundreds of thousands each day since, including nearly 800,000 on Thursday, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The omicron variant is driving that surge. While indications are that cases are less likely to be serious or fatal, the sheer number is straining hospitals and health systems.

Biden said the U.S. is expanding testing capacity and treatments to diagnose Covid and blunt its impact.

“We have so many more tools we’re developing, and continue to develop, that can contain Covid and other strains of Covid,” he said. “We’re going to be able to control this. The new normal is not going to be what it is now; it’s going to be better.”

Hospitalizations have soared in the U.S., matching the records set last year. The 7-day average of new admissions of Covid-19 patients is about 16,500 per day, 60% higher than a week earlier. But deaths from Covid have remained relatively flat so far, with an average of about 1,200 a day, compared with about 3,400 a year ago.

One seismic change since the grim totals of a year ago is vaccination. About 207 million people in the U.S., or 66.3% of the eligible population, are fully vaccinated, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.

The former Biden advisers -- who provided counsel on Covid during the president’s transition -- aired their views in three opinion articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week. 

One article warned that “Covid-19 is here to stay.” It’s not clear how long someone is protected from vaccines or a prior infection, whether therapies prevent long-term symptoms or what new variants will emerge, the former advisers wrote. 

Three of them -- Ezekiel Emanuel, Michael Osterholm and Celine Gounder -- called for a new data tracking system, a new public health workforce and permanently enacting changes to enable telemedicine, among other changes. 

“Without a strategic plan for the ‘new normal’ with endemic Covid-19, more people in the US will unnecessarily experience morbidity and mortality, health inequities will widen and trillions will be lost from the US economy,” Emanuel, Osterholm and Gounder wrote.

In the other articles, ex-advisers called for comprehensive testing and surveillance strategies, both of which are relatively ad hoc in the U.S., and to invest in developing variant-specific vaccines. 

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