According to politico, some officials of the Biden administration in the United States have been quietly discussing such a thing in recent months - if the U.S. government wants to declare victory over the epidemic, then the number of deaths in the United States due to the COVID-19 every day is an acceptable "moderate death".
According to politico's report, this discussion has not been brought to the table at present, but has been conducted privately by US government officials. These officials want to find out how many deaths of COVID-19 each day if the United States wants to declare "victory over the epidemic", so as to make the public accept the statement of "moderate death".
Politico said that its sources came from three people familiar with the relevant information.
These insiders also said that the number of deaths per day did not exceed 200, which was an acceptable "moderate death" figure considered by US government officials participating in the study. This is equivalent to 73000 deaths a year, slightly higher than the annual number of influenza deaths in the United States. However, if 500 deaths per day are too high, it means that the number of deaths per week is more than that of the "9.11" terrorist attacks.
However, these insiders then stressed that these discussions were only exploratory in nature. They were a quantitative concept used by officials to privately analyze the prospects of the epidemic and were not officially included in the US government's epidemic response plan. The US government would not say that "it is acceptable to die 200 people a day" on the table.
At the same time, as the virus continues to mutate, the US government is also avoiding using quantitative indicators to define the end time of the epidemic. Last summer, the U.S. government once predicted that the COVID-19 would be over, but soon the United States ushered in a new epidemic caused by delta and Omicron strains.
Cyrus shahpar, the data director of the COVID-19 in the White House, also publicly responded to politico's interview, saying that it is meaningless to judge whether the epidemic is over with an indicator of how many people die every day from the perspective of public health. The key to the question is whether such a figure can be maintained for a long time in the case of continuous variation of the virus.
Shaphar also said that the White House is not satisfied with the current situation of deaths in the United States, and he personally does not think that 200 deaths a day is an acceptable number.
However, politico believes that the emergence of such discussions shows that some people within the Biden administration still hope to have a framework for judging the end of the epidemic, but there is no consensus at present。