This week, COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci took the medical community aback when he announced that the U.S. is “out of the pandemic phase.” He said it as the U.S. neared its millionth COVID death, and cases are once again on the rise.
“We are certainly, right now, out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci told PBS News Hour’s Judy Woodruff on Tuesday. “We don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.
“So if you say, ‘Are we out of the pandemic phase in this country?’ We are.”
Fauci later repeated the sentiment, telling Woodruff “right now we are not in the pandemic phase in this country,” though he ended the interview by saying the world is still in a pandemic.
On Wednesday he clarified his statements, telling NPR, "What I'm referring to is that we are no longer in the acute fulminant accelerated phase of the outbreak. We're in a somewhat of a transitional phase where the cases' numbers have decelerated—and hopefully we're getting to a phase of somewhat better control, where we can begin to start to resuming more easily normal activities
The health experts Fortune spoke to were slow to criticize Fauci, saying it’s been a long and arduous two years, and that his initial statements, while incorrect, were perhaps well-intentioned slips of the tongue.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, thinks Fauci was “just being inartful,” and that an attempt at cautious optimism backfired.
But he cautioned that COVID “has continued to fool us every single time we thought we knew where it was going,” he said. “The one thing predictable is that it’s unpredictable.”
Society has the tools to ensure COVID is no longer as disruptive as it initially was, said Dr. Panagis Galiasatos, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins’ Division of Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine who treats long COVID patients.
“Masks work, stay at home [when you’re sick], quarantine as you see fit—these are weapons that [can] keep COVID from being life-threatening. I think that’s what he’s trying to get at. The pandemic is here, but we should take into account that many countries are in a different place.”
Still, public health officials need to be “careful with wording what we say,” he said.
“Was damage done? I don’t know. I do view it as a potential miscommunication. We’re all guilty of it. We’ve all probably said something we wish we could take back.”
Dr. Phoebe Lostroh, a Harvard-trained microbiology professor at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo., said she respects Fauci, who has been a “voice of reason in this outbreak.” But she questions even his revised statement.