After “15 days to slow the spread” turned into a year and a half to slow the spread, many Americans were left confused about what it’s going to take to get back to pre-pandemic normal life.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) goal remained unclear. At first, the agency said that COVID-19 restrictions were in place to keep hospitals from getting overwhelmed, but the agency soon dropped that narrative in favor of restrictions seemingly aimed at eradicating the virus.
Now, the CDC and President Joe Biden’s administration are encouraging everyone to get vaccinated to end the pandemic. But even though the White House has reached its goal of a 70% vaccination rate, Americans are still being subjected to COVID-19 restrictions.
Americans are now left with the question – what will it take?
Fox News host Bret Baier asked CDC director Rochelle Walensky that question during a July 30 interview and her answer failed to give more insight into the solution.
“The science continues to change,” Walensky said. “And while that is neither simple nor easy to convey, It’s my responsibility to keep the American people safe. And as that science evolves, I evolve with the CDC, with the guidance. What I will say is I continue to be humbled by this virus.” (RELATED: FDA Approves COVID Booster Shot For Immunocompromised Americans)
CDC Director Walensky says COVID variants are a “wild card” that could hurt progress, but current vaccines are protecting against predominant variants circulating in U.S.
“Simply put — the sooner we get more and more people vaccinated, the sooner we will all get back to normal” pic.twitter.com/QgjHSiWb8W
— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 5, 2021
The Daily Caller spoke with some experts to gain insight into what they believed it would take to get back to normal.
Dr. Amesh Adajla, a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security focused on infectious diseases, said that COVID-19 would become endemic, meaning that the virus will become a regular thing and will eventually resemble “ordinary respiratory viruses.”
Adajla emphasized the importance of high-risk individuals getting vaccinated “so that cases are decoupled from hospitalizations and death.”
Dr. Lynn Goldman, Dean of the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University, said that vaccination rates and transmissibility – although important – are not the most important metrics of how to get back to normal. Goldman agreed that COVID could become something we have to live with and said that hospitalization rates, mortality rates, and long-term side effects from the virus are the most important factors to consider.
“I suspect the pandemic may be largely over in the U.S. by late 2021 or early 2022 … by which time, almost every person in the US will have been vaccinated or been infected (with few hospitalizations and deaths among the vaccinated and many, probably shockingly many, deaths and hospitalizations among the unvaccinated),” Dr. Richard H. Ebright, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University, told the Daily Caller.
“Key parameters to follow are vaccination rates, hospitalization rates, and death rates,” he added. “I suspect the pandemic will continue in nations without access to vaccines through most or all of 2022.”
Assistant Professor in Epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, Dr. Eleanor J. Murray, argued that vaccination rates will determine when normal life can resume. Murray added that it’s important to consider global vaccination rates because COVID “is still circulating widely outside the U.S. and one of those mutants may be worse than delta.”
Dr. John Moore, professor of microbiology and immunology and Cornell University, said, “It really all comes down to vaccinations.”
“America really has a self-inflicted wound right now because we could’ve vaccinated enough Americans in the early summer to potentially eliminate the Delta surge,” he said. “That’s what’s preventing us from saying there can be an end to this pandemic.”