The COVID-19 “pandemic is over,” President Joe Biden said but acknowledged that the US still has a “problem”|The White House|CC BY 3.0 US

This is a sentence people the world over were dying to hear. The COVID-19 “pandemic is over,” President Joe Biden said Sunday on CBS’ 60 Minutes.

He, however, acknowledged that the US still has a “problem with Covid,” which has killed more than 1 million Americans.

“We’re still doing a lot of work on it,” Biden said. “But the pandemic is over.”

Deaths
COVID-19 is still a designated Public Health Emergency in the US and the World Health Organization (WHO) considers it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. But the agency believes the world is nearing the end of the pandemic, which emerged in China in late 2019 and has claimed over 6.5 million lives worldwide.

‘End in sight’
“Last week, the number of weekly reported deaths from COVID-19 was the lowest since March 2020,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu said last week. ‘We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic. We’re not there yet, but the end is in sight.

Over the past two weeks, 65,000 new cases of COVID-19 have been reported each day, with an average of 400 deaths per day, according to data from the John Hopkins University.