“The question is not when we will eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. Rather, it is when we have the virus under control. “We have a much, much lower count, hospitalization, death rate,” Offit said. “What number are people comfortable with?” He says “the doors will open” when the country gets less than 5,000 new cases a day and fewer than 100 deaths.
That last threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths per day, was echoed by other experts, following the logic that it approaches the country’s average death toll from flu. In recent years, the flu has killed 20,000 to 50,000 Americans annually, which equates to an average of 55 to 140 deaths per day, said Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “This risk was largely considered acceptable by the public,” said Eisenberg. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco, made a similar calculation. “The end of the emergency part of the pandemic in the United States should be fully heralded by a reduction in serious illness, hospitalization and deaths from COVID-19,” she said. “Less than 100 deaths per day – to reflect typical US flu deaths during a typical year – is an appropriate goal.”
The “flu test” suggested here is not a perfect comparison between apples and apples.