“The issue is not when we eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and a specialist in virology and immunology at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. Instead, it is when we have the virus sufficiently under control. “We will have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” said Offit. “What is that number that people are comfortable with?” For him, “the doors will open” when the country has less than 5,000 new cases per day and less than 100 deaths.
This last limit, of 100 deaths from COVID-19 per day, was repeated by other experts, following the logic that it is close to the average number of deaths caused by influenza in the country. In recent years, the flu has killed 20,000 to 50,000 Americans annually, which represents an average of 55 to 140 deaths per day, said Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “This risk was widely considered acceptable by the public,” said Eisenberg. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California at San Francisco, made a similar calculation. “The end of the emergency portion of the pandemic in the United States must be announced completely by reducing serious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19,” she said. “Less than 100 deaths a day – to mirror the typical flu mortality in the United States during a normal year – is an appropriate goal.”
The “flu test” proposed here is not a perfect comparison.