Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said that the U.S. is transitioning out of the pandemic phase-- before clarifying his thoughts the day after to say that the U.S. is transitioning towards an endemic phase.
His comments come as COVID cases in Massachusetts continue to climb. On Thursday, Massachusetts saw over 4,300 cases, which is 1,000 more than the day before.
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As cases rise, we asked local Boston doctors what they thought about Fauci's comments in this week's session of NBC10 Boston's "COVID Q&A" series. The doctors said that while they agree with Fauci, we are not out of the woods yet.
"I think we're clearly not where we were either in early 2020, in terms of the huge numbers of deaths that we were seeing, nor are we where we were at the beginning of this year with a large spike of Omicron," said Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes of Brigham and Women's Hospital. "Things are very different, and we're in a much better place now than we were before and across the world. We're not anywhere close to being done with this, which is what Dr. Fauci acknowledged. And so I think it is really a lot of fuss over a couple of words that have very imprecise meanings.
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Dr. Shira Doron of Tufts Medical Center echoed her colleague. She said that Fauci's comments should not be misconstrued as the country still needs federal funding to keep a wide range of tools available to be able to tackle the pandemic in case there is a rise in cases again.
"We still need a lot of resources, a lot of funding for those efforts, these tools such as availability of vaccines for all globally and here in this country, availability of testing and the ability to scale it up and down when cases are up, as they inevitably will," said Doron.
Congress is currently in the throes of an internal political battle over COVID funding. The Biden Administration has urged lawmakers to pass more COVID aid, saying the country still the tools mentioned by Doron to better fight the pandemic.
Dr. Sabrina Assoumou of Boston Medical Center pointed out that Fauci's comments about entering a "transition phase" are correct. She says that his comments follow the CDC's announcement that 60% of Americans have already been infected with the virus.
"A lot of people have seen the virus, either through infection, and the way that we actually would have wanted it, through vaccination. So that means that there is some protection against severe disease," said Assoumou. "I think I'd read more (into the) second statement that we're out of the full blown explosive pandemic phase."
Even as the doctors agree with Fauci, they say they are following a rise in cases in South Africa to see if it means a rise in cases across America, but not a lot of that data is available yet.
As much as we are in a state of low cases now and very low deaths compared to where we have been in the past, we know the variants can throw a curveball at any moment
Dr. Shira Doron, Tufts Medical Center
"The other piece is that we never know what's coming next with this virus. As much as we are in a state of low cases now and very low deaths compared to where we have been in the past, we know the variants can throw a curveball at any moment and there could be another variant right around the corner that is either more severe or more immune evasive or both and we may need to scale everything back up again," said Doron.
