The pandemic is over

A retrospective and swan song for my COVID blog

By Amy Rogers. Writer. Scientist.

A lifetime ago — April 2020 — I wrote the first of four blog posts on the coronavirus “ Endgame.” As we floundered through lockdowns and shutdowns and distancing and mask requirements and the race for a vaccine and we felt lonely and afraid and hopeless…we wondered, how will this end?

Now we know. Because as far as I’m concerned, the COVID-19 pandemic is over. The graph above shows why.

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is still with us, of course. You can view the CDC’s best guess of COVID-19 deaths per week here. As of July 2023, it’s down to a couple hundred Americans per week. For comparison, at the worst peak in January 2021, the CDC estimates 26,000 Americans died of COVID in one week.

Those numbers have always been controversial. How do you calculate an estimate of COVID deaths when COVID tests were scarce? And what did it mean to die of COVID? If a person died in the hospital of late-stage metastatic cancer but happened to test positive for the virus, did they die of COVID? What if an 85-year-old person had heart failure but was stable, then developed trouble breathing from COVID and spiraled downhill? Did they die of heart failure, or of COVID? And what about people who died of chronic disease…