The US Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, said Thursday that although the country has made significant progress in its fight against COVID-19 Compared to last year, the pandemic is not over yet.
“Between 300 and 400 people a day die from COVID. We are not over it,” he told a group of reporters on a visit to a vaccination center in Washington.
The comments of the person in charge of the Health portfolio qualify the statements that the US president, Joe Biden, gave on Sunday to the CBS network, where he assured that “the pandemic is over.”
“What the president said is what everyone feels, that we are much better now” than a year ago, Becerra said.
WHO: the world is “in a better position” to end the pandemic, but it has not yet arrived
However, Biden’s statement has already had an echo among Republicans in Congress, who seek to lift the national emergency declaration for COVID-19, proclaimed by the White House in 2020 and for the last time in February of this year.
A group of 17 House lawmakers wrote a letter on Monday asking Biden to kill the measure, and a Republican senator on Thursday introduced a resolution for the upper house to vote on the same.
“The federal government has spent some $10 trillion, resulting in an economic crisis,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter.
Becerra dismissed the idea of lifting the emergency declaration now and said that in order to make a decision, they must wait for the scientific community to make a pronouncement.
“We are going to wait for the scientists to give us a guide and tell us where we stand,” he assured.
Between August and September 2022, the US reported an average of 356 daily deaths from COVID-19, and the disease caused by the virus is the third leading cause of death in the country, after cancer and heart disease.
