“The question is not when will we remove the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This is rather when we have the virus adequately under control. “We have a much, much smaller number, hospitalization and deaths,” Offit said. “By what number do people feel comfortable?” According to him, ‘the doors are open’ when the country receives less than 5,000 new cases a day and fewer than 100 deaths.
The latter threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths per day, has been repeated by other experts, following the logic that it approaches the country’s average death toll from influenza. In recent years, the flu has killed 20 to 50,000 Americans annually, averaging 55 to 140 deaths a day, said Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “The risk is largely considered acceptable by the public,” Eisenberg said. Monica Gandhi, a specialist in infectious diseases at UC San Francisco, made a similar calculation. “The end of the emergency part of the pandemic in the United States must be fully announced by reducing serious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID-19,” she said. “Less than 100 deaths a day – to reflect the typical flu death rate in the U.S. during a typical year – is an appropriate goal.”
The ‘flu test’ presented here is not a perfect comparison between apples and apples.