It’s a big mistake to think pandemic is over, despite recent good news, experts say

Fiona Floyd, 7, does a double take as she passes J.P. Wammach, impersonating President Lincoln, on Presidents Day at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley on Monday. The last decline in cases means that we’re likely turning to a period of calm in this pandemic, representing a “containment” of the coronavirus, but “that is not the same as the pandemic being over,” Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times this week. Deaths declined over the next two years but still remained “substantially higher than in the pre-pandemic period.” “From these data, one might deduce a protracted five-year course for a COVID-19-like pandemic, suggesting that COVID-19 might occupy us well beyond 2022 if the current vaccination campaigns does not change its ‘natural’ trajectory,” Brüssow wrote. Still, the author added, “it is by no means clear whether an epidemic with similar basic characteristics will be a replay of one which occurred 140 years ago.” There are a number of differences between that pandemic and the one caused by COVID-19; such as the lack of use of masks during the 1889 pandemic, the lack of quarantine measures and the unavailability of vaccines. Daily counts of new coronavirus cases are falling rapidly in California and the U.S., but progress is not even, “and we’ve not quite turned the corner yet on deaths in California,” Rutherford said at Friday’s campus town hall meeting.