Biden administration to end national, health emergencies in May

The Biden administration plans to end national and public health emergencies tied to the coronaviruses in May, signaling a new approach to how the federal government views Covid almost three years after the pandemic started.

Emergency declarations would be extended until May 11 and then expire, the White House said in a statement Monday. The advance notice was designed to give states, health care providers and hospitals time to adjust to the changes.

The emergency status, which was first implemented during the Trump administration, was announced in response to a pair of bills in the Republican-controlled House that would immediately end the declarations.

The White House said it opposes the GOP timeline, arguing that ending the emergency programs and policies would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty within the country's health system and government operations, which extend to hospitals, doctors offices and patients.

The World Health Organization, which declared the global pandemic in 2020, said yesterday that Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged a WHO committee's view that the COVID 19 pandemic is probably at a transition point. Thousands of people in the U.S. die each week from the coronaviruses, but the figure has dropped significantly over the past two years.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last week, 3,756 people died due to Covid, compared to 22,500 people in the last week of January 2021 and about 17,000 in the same period last year.