Oct 8, 2022 3 min read

President Biden ran into some trouble a couple of weeks ago when he said in a “60 Minutes” interview that COVID-19 is “over.” The immediate reaction was that Biden had committed a gaffe and it could jeopardize efforts by his administration to round up further funding to combat the deadly virus.

Biden’s whole quote was, “We still have a problem with COVID. We still have a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”

What the president said is essentially true. Masks have mostly vanished from public spaces and the lockdowns that marked the pandemic’s darkest days are done. Vaccines and other treatments have made it possible for people who do contract the virus to have mild symptoms and avoid hospitalization. And, psychologically at least, many people have decided that they no longer want to put much energy into worrying about the coronavirus and instead have moved on to inflation, threats to democracy or the fall football season.

Many of us may be done with COVID-19. But the reality is that COVID-19 is not yet done with us.

As of mid-September, close to 400 Americans were dying of COVID-19 every day. That’s far below the thousands perishing daily when the disease was taking its most awful toll, but it’s still four times as many people who die every day in the United States in auto accidents. The majority of those who have died in recent weeks are elderly, but, according to experts, not fully up to date on their vaccinations. Those same experts don’t rule out the possibility that COVID-19 could surge yet again as the weather gets colder, and they are urging people to get vaccinated if they have not yet, and be fully boosted.

During a White House press briefing last month, Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, explained that “the seven-day average daily deaths are still too high, about 375 per day – well above the around 200 deaths a day we saw earlier this spring, and, in my mind, far too high for a vaccine-preventable disease.”

Even after 30 months of COVID-19 being in the air, officials still have their work cut out for them in nudging people to get fully boosted. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, about half of adults surveyed said they had heard little or nothing at all about the latest booster that’s designed to fight omicron and other variants that have emerged. Drew Altman, the foundation’s president and CEO, said, “America is not rushing out to get the new booster. Most are only dimly aware of it, which is not surprising in a country that seems mostly to have moved on.”

Perhaps even more concerning is the foundation’s finding that half of American parents say they will not get their children aged 5 and under vaccinated against COVID-19. So far, about 20% of children aged 6 months to 5 have received a vaccine since they first became available this summer.

More than 1 million Americans died as a result of COVID-19, and thousands of those deaths could have been avoided if people had just gotten a couple of simple, widely available shots. Estimates have it that at least 14,000 vaccine-preventable deaths were in Pennsylvania.

That number should not go any higher.