““The pandemic is over.””
“The pandemic is over,” President Joe Biden declared in a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday.
“We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. … but the pandemic is over,” Biden told CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.”
Biden’s comments are likely to raise some controversy. Last week, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that while the pandemic’s end is within sight, “we are not there yet.”
The U.S. is still averaging 465 COVID deaths a day, according to a New York Times tracker. More than 1 million Americans have died of COVID since the pandemic began in early 2020. Last week, the total number of COVID cases in the U.S. hit their lowest level since May, though infections were rising in some areas, including Texas and New York.
Also from the interview: Biden says Trump ‘irresponsible’ for storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago
Biden said the effects of the pandemic can be seen everywhere.
“I think you’d agree that the impact on the psyche of the American people as a consequence of the pandemic is profound,” he said.
“Think of how that has changed everything. You know, people’s attitudes about themselves, their families, about the state of the nation, about the state of their communities. And so there’s a lot of uncertainty out there, a great deal of uncertainty. And we lost a million people. A million people to COVID.”